This is probably not the best time to start writing this piece, because in three hours I am going to be at the truck rental place, after which it's a day of wrangling a preliminary load of Stuff up to our new home. But I have been up since 4:00 a.m. and, as has been the case since Friday, May 23rd 2014, in my quiet time when I have not been in Packing-and-Moving overdrive, I have been reading online articles about the massacre in Isla Vista.
I probably don't have anything original to say.
I am not going to give the man who perpetrated this slaughter the thing he craved - recognition from a woman - by talking about him by name. My compassion and my recognition go out to the victims of his grandiosity and his delusional thinking. Weihan Wang, age 20. Cheng Yuan Hong, age 20. George Chen, age 19. Veronika Weiss, age 19. Katherine Breann Cooper, age 22. Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, age 20.
All of them younger than my stepdaughter Brianna was when she died in 2012 at the age of 23.
I know part of what the families are suffering. But only a part. I know the incessant, unending pain that a family goes through when a child dies. It doesn't matter how old that child is. It's something a parent never recovers from - outliving his or her own child. I have met many other bereaved parents since we, too, became part of the club nobody wants to join, and the feelings of shock, bewilderment, anguish, and despair are the same for the people whose baby was born, but never drew a breath, as they are for those in their eighties whose children have passed away before they did.
But what I cannot know is what it feels like to have had this happen because someone deliberately decided to take my child's life. I am not the parent of a murder victim. And when I think of our own pain, and then think about what it could have been if we had lost Brianna in this fashion, I realize there are always deeper levels of Hell, and I have not been there yet. And because I still have one child, whom I just sent off to his first day of a summer job at 5:00 a.m. with the injunction to "Be careful...the subways are a little deserted at this hour, so try to get on a car that isn't totally empty. And please - send me a text to let me know you got there okay - I know, I'm being silly..." - I can only say yet. I won't know till the day I die whether that yet ever becomes my daily existence. Because when you have a child, you give a permanent hostage to Fortune.
So I am thinking about the families. And when I think about the families who lost their children, I have to think of the family of the young man who carried out this unimaginable act and caused all this senseless, bottomless pain. They, too, have a son who was shot that day. And I think about that, and then about how it would feel to know that my child is dead, and that he lived a life that was so twisted and tortured, and that he died so full of rage and hatred, despite all my efforts to give him a good upbringing and teach him decency and values. And to know that there was something so terribly wrong with him that I could not succeed - that all the love in the world was not going to get through to this child. And, worst of all, that he had killed others and caused all this terrible pain and grief before ending his own life.
And then I realize there are always deeper levels of Hell, and I have not been there yet.
Richard Martinez, the father of Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, has offered to meet with the father of the killer to extend his hand in working together to prevent future tragedies of this kind. Here are his words:
“I lost my son. He lost his son. We have that in common,” Richard Martinez said. “We want, if possible, that the deaths of our son and his son should mean something.”
I am in awe of his generosity of spirit and the depth of his understanding. I don't know if I could have gotten to where Richard Martinez is as quickly as he did. I am afraid I would have spent far too much time in the special, self-constructed Hell of blame, recrimination, and fantasies of revenge. Don't believe me? Well - spend a moment thinking about the killer's clearly stated and well-publicized motivations for this massacre. And then tell me that blame, recrimination, and fantasies of revenge are a cage we can afford to dwell in.
There are always deeper levels of Hell, and I have not been there yet.
The motivations stated by the killer have sparked a vigorous worldwide dialogue about misogyny and the sense of entitlement to women's bodies that societal mores have fostered in some men. I'm not going to weigh in with my opinions here. But I am going to tell you about a conversation I had last night with my husband.
"Hey," I said. "Maybe you can tell me. You're a guy. Do guys ever...I mean...I'm trying to imagine what it's like to live without...you know...fear of sexual violence. I mean, not even - necessarily - fear of actual rape. Just... tell me. When you are out walking alone at night, are you ever afraid? I mean, afraid that somebody, a total stranger, might say something to you, something ugly, something sexual? And that it could escalate, and what would you do if that happened? How could you get away? Do you start second-guessing yourself - like, 'Oh, I shouldn't have walked home this way. That was stupid - I should have just sprung for a cab, even though I don't really have enough money'?"
He looked completely taken aback. He did think about it for a short while, in order to do justice to the question. But then his answer was prompt and definitive. "Nope. Never happened in my life."
I have a pretty good imagination. I can read Anna Karenina, and I can understand what it's like to be, in turn, Anna, Kitty, and even Levin - the whole time, I am right there in the book, feeling what they feel, experiencing what they're experiencing. I can talk to friends who are going through great joy, or through great sorrow, and I can empathetically feel what they are feeling. But I cannot imagine what it is like to walk around in my own neighborhood, minding my own business, and never have to be on the alert that this kind of thing happens to women who are not constantly on the alert. And even to those who are on the alert. I cannot imagine not living with constant subliminal fear.
At first, I couldn't remember a time when I had not experienced this fear. It has been part of my ordinary daily existence for so long that it seems like I've always had it as a part of my internal life. But I knew that was absurd. Nobody is born with this kind of instinctive fear. It's something we learn. When had I learned it? It wasn't until I was lying awake on the pillow next to my husband's, staring at the ceiling, that it clicked. There was a moment, and I know what it was.
I must have been eight or nine years old, and was on vacation with my family, visiting friends who lived in a very rural area. Their daughter and I quickly became fast friends, and one golden afternoon we decided to take a long walk through farmland and through the woods. We had a glorious time, walking along together, singing and skipping and linking arms, the way that happy little girls do on a gorgeous summer day, and we must have been gone for about three or four hours.
Unfortunately, it hadn't occurred to either of us to tell our parents where we were going.
We got home to two frantic sets of parents, who had been searching everywhere for us. We were grabbed, embraced, lectured, scolded, admonished - and, as a result, we were completely confused. Why were they making such a fuss? We'd had a wonderful day, and of course we'd gotten home all right!
I voiced my thoughts to my father, who regarded me severely and said, "Listen to me. What if you'd met a stranger, and he'd tried to talk to you?"
Having been raised to be polite, I knew the answer to that one. "I'd have said, "Hello! How are you?"
My father's aspect grew severer. "And what if he'd tried to get you to go somewhere with him?"
"Then I'd have said, 'No, thanks, I'm already walking with my friend,'" I retorted cheerfully.
My father's voice didn't change, but his next words took me completely aback. "And what if he'd said, 'Little girl, do you want to play with my you-know-what?'"
I was stunned by the question, but I smiled pertly and declared, "Well, then I'd just have told him NO THANK YOU!"
My father shook his head. He wasn't angry - just very serious. "And then - he would have killed you."
I stared. For once, I had no reply to make. It had never entered my mind that anything so monstrous could happen to a happy little girl who was simply walking along in the sunshine.
But from that day on, I walked under that same sun in the knowledge that it could happen, and that it did happen. And I was never again so free as I'd been before.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Repatriating the Library
We have a custom in our house. We don't drive anywhere the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend. And we don't drive anywhere the Monday of the Memorial Day weekend. But we do go places on the weekend itself. Which works out very nicely, because the highways tend to be nice and empty then. As do the museums and the theaters...please, keep it under your hat.
This year, of course, we are moving, and so the drive was more utilitarian in nature than is the norm. Yesterday we discovered that the new car (What new car? The one with the four-wheel drive that you need outside of the city, when you can no longer simply leave the family car frozen into its parking space for three weeks and take the subway everywhere) will haul 16 Fresh Direct cartons filled with books (my building's porter has been exceedingly gracious about re-purposing those cartons to our doorstep).
Before I could fill those cartons, I had to get my son and my husband to help me pick up the enormous L-shaped leather sofa and move it two feet forward into the center of the room. Four years ago we had moved into this apartment (which is large, by NYC standards) from a still larger (and still pricier) one 16 blocks south. In a mere four years, this apartment's rent has caught up in sheer loony ridiculousness to the rent we had decided then that no reasonable human being should be willing to pay. This place is smaller by two rooms, and the neighborhood, while Very Good Upper West, is not Prime Upper West. Time to go!
But the reason I bring this up is that, for the last four years, 12 solid shelves of books have been hidden behind the back of the sofa, stacked on their backs with their tails facing out (did you know that, in bookbinder parlance, a book has a head and a tail, in addition to a spine? I'm not making this up). I have not seen their honest faces for four long years. In that time, they have waited patiently, and I have missed them more than you might imagine. I have also had those horrible moments of wondering whether a cherished book was purged in a moment of Moving Madness, sacrificed to the chanted invocations of my husband, the High Priest of Spartan Living:
"Clutter and junk! Clutter and junk! Can't we get rid of some of that clutter and junk?"
It turned out that more books had survived his frantic pleas than I'd feared, although I can't imagine what could have possessed me to sacrifice all but the first volume of the Bloom County series. I mean, that makes no sense. Thank heavens I had the wit (and sneakiness) to smuggle in the collected works of Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, and Bill Watterson! Not to mention Chas. Addams (in hardcover, yet.)
It's remarkable what you find you have forgotten you own, in terms of books, when circumstances have forced you to stash them in some un-get-at-able place for a while. I kept on emitting little coos of welcome and delight as I lovingly dusted them off, patting them gently on their little heads, and promising that from now on, each one was going to have a lovely accessible shelf space all to themselves because we had bought a big house just for them!
So out they came - all the books I'd thought I could (under direst necessity) live without. I found out I had a rather nice collection of books on Fabergé, and that at some point I seem to have wanted to own every book on the Romanovs (and, in particular, the Anastasia claimants) that I could get my hands on. Ditto Sarah Bernhardt. I had a bunch of those Wishful Thinking cookbooks that you only have because the pictures and the descriptions are so mind-blowingly yummy that you convince yourself you're actually going to cook all those things one day. The Russian Tearoom Cookbook fell nicely into both the Food Porn and Imperial Russia obsessions, so that was a find.
Then there were the books I'd read to my son when he was little enough to be read to, and of course at that point I was practically dancing with glee and nostalgia. The standards like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (mine is signed by Eric Carle) were nice, but what really had me clapping my hands was all the out-of-print arcana that I knew my son was going to be saying things like, "Hey, Ma...whatever happened to that book about the old lady who wanted to adopt every kind of animal in the world, except an elephant?" about if he ever had any kids of his own.
Up they went yesterday, all sixteen boxes -and today I got down to cases again and started in on the Visible Books. I packed diligently for two hours - and, having once owned a used bookstore, I am an excellent book packer and waste not an inch of space - while my husband played chess on his laptop and sighed about what a headache moving is. (He did promise to help with the kitchen packing, and since I don't want to keep hearing him ask me whether I actually need all these books, I was happy with the deal.)
Today's load of the next sixteen boxes was comprised of all the Visible Books; I even made inroads on the Fancy Glass Door Bookcases, which is where I keep the Incredibly Impressive Stuff that is meant to let you know that I am Very Smart and don't just spend all my time re-reading Forever Amber.
So James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov were forced from their cozy Manhattan abode, and will have to learn to endure country life. Leo Tolstoy, of course, is overjoyed - he never liked cities anyway. Emma Bovary is threatening to poison herself if she has to move to the country, but then, nobody takes Emma Bovary very seriously. Walt Whitman is at home anywhere he goes, but Edward Albee is decidedly grumpy and is talking about writing a play about two people who move to a mysterious mansion in the country and then go mad because of solitude and the absence of Zabar's, and finally take their revenge by talking one another to death. He's going to call it Tiny Palace.
There's still a lot left to pack, and I do not have too many books.
This year, of course, we are moving, and so the drive was more utilitarian in nature than is the norm. Yesterday we discovered that the new car (What new car? The one with the four-wheel drive that you need outside of the city, when you can no longer simply leave the family car frozen into its parking space for three weeks and take the subway everywhere) will haul 16 Fresh Direct cartons filled with books (my building's porter has been exceedingly gracious about re-purposing those cartons to our doorstep).
Before I could fill those cartons, I had to get my son and my husband to help me pick up the enormous L-shaped leather sofa and move it two feet forward into the center of the room. Four years ago we had moved into this apartment (which is large, by NYC standards) from a still larger (and still pricier) one 16 blocks south. In a mere four years, this apartment's rent has caught up in sheer loony ridiculousness to the rent we had decided then that no reasonable human being should be willing to pay. This place is smaller by two rooms, and the neighborhood, while Very Good Upper West, is not Prime Upper West. Time to go!
But the reason I bring this up is that, for the last four years, 12 solid shelves of books have been hidden behind the back of the sofa, stacked on their backs with their tails facing out (did you know that, in bookbinder parlance, a book has a head and a tail, in addition to a spine? I'm not making this up). I have not seen their honest faces for four long years. In that time, they have waited patiently, and I have missed them more than you might imagine. I have also had those horrible moments of wondering whether a cherished book was purged in a moment of Moving Madness, sacrificed to the chanted invocations of my husband, the High Priest of Spartan Living:
"Clutter and junk! Clutter and junk! Can't we get rid of some of that clutter and junk?"
It turned out that more books had survived his frantic pleas than I'd feared, although I can't imagine what could have possessed me to sacrifice all but the first volume of the Bloom County series. I mean, that makes no sense. Thank heavens I had the wit (and sneakiness) to smuggle in the collected works of Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, and Bill Watterson! Not to mention Chas. Addams (in hardcover, yet.)
It's remarkable what you find you have forgotten you own, in terms of books, when circumstances have forced you to stash them in some un-get-at-able place for a while. I kept on emitting little coos of welcome and delight as I lovingly dusted them off, patting them gently on their little heads, and promising that from now on, each one was going to have a lovely accessible shelf space all to themselves because we had bought a big house just for them!
So out they came - all the books I'd thought I could (under direst necessity) live without. I found out I had a rather nice collection of books on Fabergé, and that at some point I seem to have wanted to own every book on the Romanovs (and, in particular, the Anastasia claimants) that I could get my hands on. Ditto Sarah Bernhardt. I had a bunch of those Wishful Thinking cookbooks that you only have because the pictures and the descriptions are so mind-blowingly yummy that you convince yourself you're actually going to cook all those things one day. The Russian Tearoom Cookbook fell nicely into both the Food Porn and Imperial Russia obsessions, so that was a find.
Then there were the books I'd read to my son when he was little enough to be read to, and of course at that point I was practically dancing with glee and nostalgia. The standards like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (mine is signed by Eric Carle) were nice, but what really had me clapping my hands was all the out-of-print arcana that I knew my son was going to be saying things like, "Hey, Ma...whatever happened to that book about the old lady who wanted to adopt every kind of animal in the world, except an elephant?" about if he ever had any kids of his own.
Up they went yesterday, all sixteen boxes -and today I got down to cases again and started in on the Visible Books. I packed diligently for two hours - and, having once owned a used bookstore, I am an excellent book packer and waste not an inch of space - while my husband played chess on his laptop and sighed about what a headache moving is. (He did promise to help with the kitchen packing, and since I don't want to keep hearing him ask me whether I actually need all these books, I was happy with the deal.)
Today's load of the next sixteen boxes was comprised of all the Visible Books; I even made inroads on the Fancy Glass Door Bookcases, which is where I keep the Incredibly Impressive Stuff that is meant to let you know that I am Very Smart and don't just spend all my time re-reading Forever Amber.
So James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov were forced from their cozy Manhattan abode, and will have to learn to endure country life. Leo Tolstoy, of course, is overjoyed - he never liked cities anyway. Emma Bovary is threatening to poison herself if she has to move to the country, but then, nobody takes Emma Bovary very seriously. Walt Whitman is at home anywhere he goes, but Edward Albee is decidedly grumpy and is talking about writing a play about two people who move to a mysterious mansion in the country and then go mad because of solitude and the absence of Zabar's, and finally take their revenge by talking one another to death. He's going to call it Tiny Palace.
There's still a lot left to pack, and I do not have too many books.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Fine-Feathered Swans
I am a firm believer in abandoning irksome chores and taking off instead to have a Wonderful Cultural Experience when the occasion presents itself. Yesterday, I has the time, the inclination, and the perfect companion, my friend Corine. Corine, whose motto is dum vivimus, vivamus - While we live, let us live! - and I ran off together on the crosstown bus to see the Charles James: Beyond Fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I had carefully doped out in advance that a Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m. would be a good time to take this in. The exhibition opened last week with great hoopla and hundreds of celebrities attending in full fashionista regalia, so there was a lot of publicity, and I was trying to come up with a time that would not be overwhelmingly crowded, since that takes all the fun out of it and you can't see anything. I chose well; when Corine and I got there, you could actually see the museum steps. In other words, they were not so mobbed with people that you couldn't see the granite. (By the time we left, this was not the case.)
I didn't know much about the designer Charles James, other than that he began hitting his stride in his career in the glamour era of the 1920's-30's. The previous night, hoping that I would look at the clothes and find them ugly and overrated, so that I wouldn't have to get on the bus - and possibly fight the museum crowds - when I was really supposed to be packing for our move, I'd looked up images of his clothes on the Internet. Both luckily and unluckily for me, it took about 2 seconds to realize that I would be an absolute fool to pass up the opportunity to see these remarkable pieces of art. I'm never sorry for the things I've done; I'm always sorry for the things I didn't do. So - I decided to do it.
I love going places with Corine, although I should tell you right now that she has been a New Yorker her entire life and sometimes I feel like she knows everybody in town, and that everybody in town knows Corine. I have yet to go anywhere with her without having somebody bear down upon us with outstretched arms, squealing, "Co-RIIIIINNNNE!" It's like being Madonna's un-famous best friend. This day was no exception; we got on the bus, and there, exquisitely dressed in a smart green suit, sat a lady whose mouth and eyes popped open in the shock of recognition I have come to expect when I go someplace with Corine, and the cries of, "Oh, my God, I just can't be-lieve it!" commenced. As I say - I kinda love it. Corine used to be a school principal, and the lady in green had been one of her teachers; I have also seen Corine swarmed by great big "children" in their thirties who still address her as "Miss" and can't wait to let her know that they are doing well in their lives and that their families are going to be so excited that they ran into her! There are also her political friends; her opera friends; her theater friends; her ballet friends; the people she went to India with; the people she traveled through China with; her former neighbors; her current neighbors; her...well, you get the idea. What I'm saying is, the lady is popular.
We didn't quite know what to expect of the exhibition, although I'd seen some of the images online. The "architecture" of the garments was much discussed in all the reviews, which sounded a trifle forbidding... I was uneasily picturing Gary Beach as Roger De Bris in The Producers, dressed up as the Chrysler Building.
This was a misconception akin to attending a W.H. Auden poetry reading expecting to hear Ogden Nash.
What these clothes had that struck me instantly was structure. Now, when I write poetry, I am a form poet. I love taking an established form and playing with it, riffing on it, turning it on its head, and seeing what changes I can make within that basic structure and still have it be recognizably that particular form, but making it my own by whatever I layer over the skeleton. This is what Charles James does with couture. He takes the basic structure of, say, an evening gown, breaks it down into components, and then reassembles it with such delicate skill that you'd swear it had sprung forth whole from the earth - a fantastic, exotic blossom that was never created by human hands.
The exhibition is weirdly divided into two different wings AND two different floors of the museum. We started with the ball gowns, because that's where the guard directed us. There are a dozen, all of them ravishing, all of them different. It would be hard to pick a favorite. Three in particular stand out in memory. I have tried in vain to post individual images, and shall have to settle for advising you to Google Charles James Images, if you are so inclined.
One gown consists of a slim sheath that would be a conventional form-hugging décolleté evening gown, save for what James does with artful draping. Indeed, artful draping and folding are this designer's signature - he is the origami master of couture. The lines that construct each garment are clean and distinctive; the folds are the breaks in those immaculate lines that add interest and mystery. The ivory silk of gown itself descends in narrow, V-shaped ruching to the instep, leaving not the slightest doubt as to the perfect contours of the body within it. Behind the outline of the body is an extravagant, outrageously over-the-top pouffe of dull-gold gauze that extends to the sides and out behind the wearer - a cross between the train of a nineteenth century ballgown and a peacock's tail.
Another is an equally form-fitting gown of a dark, severe grey - a hue fit for a battleship, fitting the mannequin as sleekly as a helmet - that terminates, shockingly, in a foot-high pannier, standing stiffly out a good two feet to either side, that seems, as the curator describes it, as if Marie Antoinette had accidentally dropped her signature fashion statement to mid-calf level.
"Why are all the beautiful gowns made for skinny women?" Corine murmured as we approached yet another beauty - this one described as a "cloverleaf," meaning that the skirt flared out gracefully at the base into four looped formations that stood out at least a yard apiece from the feet of the wearer. Above the heavy honey-colored taffeta of the cloverleaves ascended a fantastic black-embroidered trompe-l'œil skirt on ivory silk that simulated enormous and intricate lace flowers and whose pattern rose above the slender waistline like a pair of hands clasped about the ball-goer's midriff.
"Because," I replied, "these gowns are actually flowers - great, impressionistic blooms - and the body that is required to wear them is merely the stalk. Stalks are always frail in comparison with the flowers - the stalks are only there in order to support the blossom."
I glanced at the text accompanying the gown, and whatever faint tinge of esteem I might ever have harbored for tabloid king William Randolph Hearst (it was already at zero) plummeted into the abyss and was extinguished forevermore. There, exquisitely photographed in the cloverleaf gown, was Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and all I could think of was, "If that's Mrs. Hearst, what on earth was the man playing footsie with Marion Davies for?" Here, indeed, was one of those women out of legend that Truman Capote had been wont to call his swans.
The second part of the exhibition was on the other side of the museum - as one of the guards cryptically informed us, "You have to make a left, and then go through Egypt." It was a little aggravating, and something of a hike, but I promise you, it is worth the trouble. Not only are the clothes astonishing, but it is here that the sketches, letters, notes, and quotations of the master are to be found. It was here that I whipped out my cell phone, under the beady eye of another guard who was about to bark, "No pictures, no pictures!" only to wilt when she realized I was using my Notepad app to copy some of the texts instead.
Make the grain do the work, was the first bit of advice etched onto the glass panel surrounding Charles James' creations, and I nodded in appreciation - I have always found it smarter, when creating, to go with the flow, rather than struggle against it, if harmony and a sense of serene luxury are the aim. The very first time I took a bookbinding class, I was asked to hold up my paper, see which way it "wanted" to crease, and to understand that this defined my paper's grain and would therefore dictate the construction of my book.
I smiled over Charles James' "Wish List" of celebrities he had not dressed, but would have liked to - Maria Callas, whom he compared to a Stradivarius violin; Mick Jagger, the "sexy bastard"; and Audrey Hepburn, whom in a flash of inspiration he dubbed a "wisp of iron." Next to it hung a rant to his staff as to what was expected of them if they were to fill the maître's incredibly perfectionistic standards of excellence, and railing because they failed to put for the degree of effort he relentlessly demanded of himself.
But the quotation that spoke to me on the most profound level was that in which he addressed the rapture of the act of creation:
I have sometimes spent 12 hours working on one seam; utterly entranced, and not hungry or tired till finally it had, as of its own will, found the perfect place where it should be placed.
And in my mind, the words of W.B. Yeats echoed and resounded, as I realized that Charles James, too, was a poet:
I had carefully doped out in advance that a Wednesday morning at 10:30 a.m. would be a good time to take this in. The exhibition opened last week with great hoopla and hundreds of celebrities attending in full fashionista regalia, so there was a lot of publicity, and I was trying to come up with a time that would not be overwhelmingly crowded, since that takes all the fun out of it and you can't see anything. I chose well; when Corine and I got there, you could actually see the museum steps. In other words, they were not so mobbed with people that you couldn't see the granite. (By the time we left, this was not the case.)
I didn't know much about the designer Charles James, other than that he began hitting his stride in his career in the glamour era of the 1920's-30's. The previous night, hoping that I would look at the clothes and find them ugly and overrated, so that I wouldn't have to get on the bus - and possibly fight the museum crowds - when I was really supposed to be packing for our move, I'd looked up images of his clothes on the Internet. Both luckily and unluckily for me, it took about 2 seconds to realize that I would be an absolute fool to pass up the opportunity to see these remarkable pieces of art. I'm never sorry for the things I've done; I'm always sorry for the things I didn't do. So - I decided to do it.
I love going places with Corine, although I should tell you right now that she has been a New Yorker her entire life and sometimes I feel like she knows everybody in town, and that everybody in town knows Corine. I have yet to go anywhere with her without having somebody bear down upon us with outstretched arms, squealing, "Co-RIIIIINNNNE!" It's like being Madonna's un-famous best friend. This day was no exception; we got on the bus, and there, exquisitely dressed in a smart green suit, sat a lady whose mouth and eyes popped open in the shock of recognition I have come to expect when I go someplace with Corine, and the cries of, "Oh, my God, I just can't be-lieve it!" commenced. As I say - I kinda love it. Corine used to be a school principal, and the lady in green had been one of her teachers; I have also seen Corine swarmed by great big "children" in their thirties who still address her as "Miss" and can't wait to let her know that they are doing well in their lives and that their families are going to be so excited that they ran into her! There are also her political friends; her opera friends; her theater friends; her ballet friends; the people she went to India with; the people she traveled through China with; her former neighbors; her current neighbors; her...well, you get the idea. What I'm saying is, the lady is popular.
We didn't quite know what to expect of the exhibition, although I'd seen some of the images online. The "architecture" of the garments was much discussed in all the reviews, which sounded a trifle forbidding... I was uneasily picturing Gary Beach as Roger De Bris in The Producers, dressed up as the Chrysler Building.
This was a misconception akin to attending a W.H. Auden poetry reading expecting to hear Ogden Nash.
What these clothes had that struck me instantly was structure. Now, when I write poetry, I am a form poet. I love taking an established form and playing with it, riffing on it, turning it on its head, and seeing what changes I can make within that basic structure and still have it be recognizably that particular form, but making it my own by whatever I layer over the skeleton. This is what Charles James does with couture. He takes the basic structure of, say, an evening gown, breaks it down into components, and then reassembles it with such delicate skill that you'd swear it had sprung forth whole from the earth - a fantastic, exotic blossom that was never created by human hands.
The exhibition is weirdly divided into two different wings AND two different floors of the museum. We started with the ball gowns, because that's where the guard directed us. There are a dozen, all of them ravishing, all of them different. It would be hard to pick a favorite. Three in particular stand out in memory. I have tried in vain to post individual images, and shall have to settle for advising you to Google Charles James Images, if you are so inclined.
One gown consists of a slim sheath that would be a conventional form-hugging décolleté evening gown, save for what James does with artful draping. Indeed, artful draping and folding are this designer's signature - he is the origami master of couture. The lines that construct each garment are clean and distinctive; the folds are the breaks in those immaculate lines that add interest and mystery. The ivory silk of gown itself descends in narrow, V-shaped ruching to the instep, leaving not the slightest doubt as to the perfect contours of the body within it. Behind the outline of the body is an extravagant, outrageously over-the-top pouffe of dull-gold gauze that extends to the sides and out behind the wearer - a cross between the train of a nineteenth century ballgown and a peacock's tail.
Another is an equally form-fitting gown of a dark, severe grey - a hue fit for a battleship, fitting the mannequin as sleekly as a helmet - that terminates, shockingly, in a foot-high pannier, standing stiffly out a good two feet to either side, that seems, as the curator describes it, as if Marie Antoinette had accidentally dropped her signature fashion statement to mid-calf level.
"Why are all the beautiful gowns made for skinny women?" Corine murmured as we approached yet another beauty - this one described as a "cloverleaf," meaning that the skirt flared out gracefully at the base into four looped formations that stood out at least a yard apiece from the feet of the wearer. Above the heavy honey-colored taffeta of the cloverleaves ascended a fantastic black-embroidered trompe-l'œil skirt on ivory silk that simulated enormous and intricate lace flowers and whose pattern rose above the slender waistline like a pair of hands clasped about the ball-goer's midriff.
"Because," I replied, "these gowns are actually flowers - great, impressionistic blooms - and the body that is required to wear them is merely the stalk. Stalks are always frail in comparison with the flowers - the stalks are only there in order to support the blossom."
I glanced at the text accompanying the gown, and whatever faint tinge of esteem I might ever have harbored for tabloid king William Randolph Hearst (it was already at zero) plummeted into the abyss and was extinguished forevermore. There, exquisitely photographed in the cloverleaf gown, was Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, and all I could think of was, "If that's Mrs. Hearst, what on earth was the man playing footsie with Marion Davies for?" Here, indeed, was one of those women out of legend that Truman Capote had been wont to call his swans.
The second part of the exhibition was on the other side of the museum - as one of the guards cryptically informed us, "You have to make a left, and then go through Egypt." It was a little aggravating, and something of a hike, but I promise you, it is worth the trouble. Not only are the clothes astonishing, but it is here that the sketches, letters, notes, and quotations of the master are to be found. It was here that I whipped out my cell phone, under the beady eye of another guard who was about to bark, "No pictures, no pictures!" only to wilt when she realized I was using my Notepad app to copy some of the texts instead.
Make the grain do the work, was the first bit of advice etched onto the glass panel surrounding Charles James' creations, and I nodded in appreciation - I have always found it smarter, when creating, to go with the flow, rather than struggle against it, if harmony and a sense of serene luxury are the aim. The very first time I took a bookbinding class, I was asked to hold up my paper, see which way it "wanted" to crease, and to understand that this defined my paper's grain and would therefore dictate the construction of my book.
I smiled over Charles James' "Wish List" of celebrities he had not dressed, but would have liked to - Maria Callas, whom he compared to a Stradivarius violin; Mick Jagger, the "sexy bastard"; and Audrey Hepburn, whom in a flash of inspiration he dubbed a "wisp of iron." Next to it hung a rant to his staff as to what was expected of them if they were to fill the maître's incredibly perfectionistic standards of excellence, and railing because they failed to put for the degree of effort he relentlessly demanded of himself.
But the quotation that spoke to me on the most profound level was that in which he addressed the rapture of the act of creation:
I have sometimes spent 12 hours working on one seam; utterly entranced, and not hungry or tired till finally it had, as of its own will, found the perfect place where it should be placed.
And in my mind, the words of W.B. Yeats echoed and resounded, as I realized that Charles James, too, was a poet:
Adam's Curse
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
100 Proof
I'm simply aghast that I didn't catch every single typo, even on three rigorous comb-throughs. But that's why we have galleys. And John, dear, if you start fiddling with Aesthetic Improvements at this stage of the game, your first novel may well be your last. Just sayin'.
I have now delivered my own Saggy Baggy Monster of a novel, The F.U. Diet, into John Wirenius's capable little hands, explaining that I am about 10% of the way from writing Finis. Kindly prayers from my Gentle Readers that John will enjoy my book as much as I enjoyed his would be ... kindly.
http://anglocatontheprowl.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-proof-is-in-proofing.html?spref=fb
I have now delivered my own Saggy Baggy Monster of a novel, The F.U. Diet, into John Wirenius's capable little hands, explaining that I am about 10% of the way from writing Finis. Kindly prayers from my Gentle Readers that John will enjoy my book as much as I enjoyed his would be ... kindly.
http://anglocatontheprowl.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-proof-is-in-proofing.html?spref=fb
Friday, May 16, 2014
On Not Translating "The Tin Drum"
Long, long time ago...I can still remember how "The Tin Drum" used to make me cry...
Well, not, it didn't; that's a lie. I never cried over Gunter Grass's magnum opus. I did write my senior thesis on it when I was doing a double major in German and English in college (and indeed, that was a long, long time ago). For some occult reason, Barnard doesn't offer a degree in comparative literature; hence, the double major. As I recall, I wrote about death and funerals in the novel, after realizing that not a single character in the book dies in what could be described as an even remotely natural fashion - and trust me, there was plenty of material.
I recently picked up the familiar (once you've written a thesis on it, the thing is practically engraved on your heart - Mary Tudor famously remarked that when they opened her up for the autopsy, they would find Calais - the English outpost in France that was lost under her reign - written on her heart; the coroner who gets me is going to find something that reads like a short list of the Harvard Classics) tome and settled in for an entertainingly macabre read. I suppose one could make a case for saying that Grass is an unsung pioneer of Teutonic Magical Realism. Impossible things are always happening in his books, and the reader is asked to swallow quite a lot. To begin with, there's the protagonist, Oskar, who announces in Chapter 1 that he is writing his memoirs from his bed in an insane asylum, thus establishing himself as that character so dear to the hearts of twentieth century novelist - the untrustworthy, antiheroic, first-person narrator who is saying, "Trust me." (You're right -you've met him before, in a Ken Kesey novel.) Generally speaking, when you start off with this set-up, Social Critique is about to descend on you, like a 50 lb. bag of wet laundry falling from the clear blue sky.
Oskar would have us believe that, at the age of three, he made a deliberate decision that he would stop growing, because the grown-ups surrounding him were...well, the whole first half of the book is set during the rise of the Third Reich, so - need I say more? He therefore stages an accident (trap door, root cellar) to explain his failure to thrive, and thereafter communicates primarily by rat-a-tat-tatting on the red-and-white toy tin drum of the title. (Red and white are also big themes, since the book is set in Gdansk/Danzig, and the Poles are trying to keep the place under the red-and-white Polish flag rather than cede it to the red-and-white flag with the big black spider in the middle belonging to the opposition.) Oh - one more unbelievable thing about little Oskar. He can, and does, shatter glass by screaming at it.
I like grotesques. My favorite building in my own neighborhood is on 110th Street and features a quartet of lolling, moping degenerates, rendered into stone by some deranged architectural sculptor, who would do Quasimodo proud. I like Angela Carter novels, with their cast of caricatures straight out of a Tim Burton movie and their wacky, opium-dream-like, S&M flavored scenarios. So I was all set for an enjoyable re-read.
By the time I was partially through the first chapter of the English translation by Ralph Manheim, which is the original translation and therefore around 50 years old, I found myself wanting to look up things in the original German edition to see how the Manheim text compared for accuracy and for overall flavor (for lack of a better word). I was dissatisfied. Unaware that a new translation by Breon Mitchell has hit the shelves and is being lauded as the best available translation, I toyed with the idea of translating the book myself, and I read on from there with an eye towards the somewhat daunting project of rendering its 734 pages into an English version that I would want to read. To this end, I vacillated between the English and the German texts like a distracted little pendulum, clicking my tongue in tut-tutting reproof at some of Manheim's more outré misdemeanors.
But I ultimately decided against it. Why? Not because there was already a new translation on the market - I did not, in fact, discover this until about 15 minutes ago, while writing this post and looking up the name of the original translator online. (At which point, of course, I said to myself, "Well. Good thing I abandoned that project on the drawing board. Wouldn't I have wound up feeling silly!)
No, I'm afraid that the reason was much simpler than that. It was, in fact, the fear that I would lose my reason, were I to take this novel to my heart and spend the next couple of years absorbing myself in it so completely that I would eat, sleep, dream, and breathe The Tin Drum. By the time I was a quarter of the way into it, I was saying to myself, "How is it that I never realized before that this is really a very sick and depressing book?" It must be that one's perspective changes as the years go by; I used to find the misadventures of Dostoevki's characters rather merry. Now, I just think I'd cross the street if I saw them coming.
The reason that Oskar is spinning his tales from a mental ward is that, obsessed with nurses and their white uniforms with the little red cross on the bosom, he has found himself accused of doing away with one Sister Dorothea, whose dismembered finger has been discovered among his possessions. (That finger, Oskar's drumsticks, and a number of other fairly crude phallic symbols pop up their little heads almost as frequently as death, the funerals, and the red-and-white imagery. When Herr Grass finds a symbol he likes, he sticks with it.) Of course, Oskar claims he simply found the finger lying around somewhere (in point of fact, he puts the world's oldest excuse for missing homework in reverse and asserts that a dog gave it to him). Charmed by its visual similarity to those phallic drumsticks that he's always playing with, Oskar simply tucked it into his pocket and strolled home. Whether the reader wants to believe him or not is each individual's call; even in fiction, however, the authorities apparently had a hard time digesting that story.
Meditating on Sister Dorothea and her disjointed digit reminded me of an incident from my own past - again, long, long time ago. The summer of my junior year, in fact. I was doing the summer study abroad thing and had pushed my Eurail pass to its limits - which, in my case, was the Aran Isles, off the western coast of Ireland. (I had seen Man of Aran on PBS and had read J.M. Synge, so there ya go. Literature junkies will go practically anywhere, once they've read about it in a work of fiction.)
I came off the ferry, toting my enormous red backpack, and trudged along until I found a B&B that had a vacancy. The B&B's owner, it seemed, was away, but had left its administration in charge of a neighbor, who assured me that I would sleep very well, as there was only one other guest staying there at the moment, a quiet gentleman of middle years. From Germany, she believed. She undertook to pop in from her own house next door and put a breakfast in front of us in the morning.
The next morning, I was at the deserted breakfast table, having just had a plate of eggs and a rasher of bacon set before me, and was trying to choke down the unpalatable stuff that passed for coffee in Ireland of the early 1980's. I was, of course, reading at the table; the book in my hand was the highly-recognizable paperback edition of Die Blechtrommel. Since I was planning to use it for my thesis, I was getting an early start.
My fellow-lodger entered. I glanced up, found him intolerably old and not at all attractive to my 21 year old eyes, murmured, "Guten Morgen," and went back to my book and the execrable coffee. Perhaps I was showing off a bit - I probably elevated the book slightly, in order to make it quite clear that I was smart in not just one, but two languages.
My companion burst into a positive torrent of German. He was enchanted to meet me, and still more enchanted that I spoke his language so fluently. What was I reading?
I raised my eyebrows and the book slightly higher. "Die Blechtrommel. D'you know it?"
He burst into a cackle, and literally rubbed his hand with glee. "Do I know it? Ha! Gunter Grass! I know him! I went to school with that fellow! Ha! A troublemaker!"
"Oh?" I glanced down at my book, on the back of which was a photograph of the author. It looked remarkably like my interlocutor. "In what way, a troublemaker?"
He grew downright gleeful. "Oh, it's better not to say. Tell me, are you travelling alone?"
I allowed as how I was, which seemed to put him into an even better mood. He rambled on and on, still in German, interrupting himself, repeating himself, explaining himself, digressing in a dozen directions, rambling back to what a coincidence it was to find a young lady sharing his temporary residence, a young lady who was reading that particular novel, a novel by that particular troublemaker Gunter Grass, whom he remembered so well as being a troublemaker from his own days as a schoolboy...
At last, feeling in his shirt pocket, he exclaimed that he must have lost his sunglasses, why, yes, his sunglasses were missing, deuce take it, now where could they be? Ah - he had it - he must have left them on that rock, the rock he'd been climbing yesterday, that very scenic and beautiful rock with the extraordinarily beautiful command of that very scenic vista. Dash it all, he'd have to go back to that rock, that dratted, that wonderful rock, go back and see whether his sunglasses were still there! And wouldn't I like to come along, and help him hunt for his sunglasses?
By now, all the 21-year-old-girl-who-has-gotten used-to-being-sexually-harassed-by-lecherous-middle-aged-men in me was raising its hackles, silently screaming CREEPER! And it wasn't just, regular, run-of-the-mill creepiness. There was a disturbing note of obsession to his insistence that I accompany him to this secluded spot far away from the village. His refusal to take no for an answer grew more and more alarming, and it was with some difficulty that I convinced him that I had other plans that Simply. Would. Not. Wait.
I decided, as I rambled about the island sweetly alone at last, that I was going to make a point of it to avoid my fellow-lodger. Whether or not he was the man in the picture, I neither knew nor cared. All I cared about was that I was spending a second night alone in an otherwise empty house with a Creeper. The other B&B's were full-up, or I'd have grabbed my gear and moved on the spot.
That night, I slipped into my room without encountering him. I was almost asleep, when I thought I heard something stirring on the other side of my locked door. Did I hear the doorknob being tested, ever so gently? I couldn't be sure. It was a long time before I fell asleep.
In the morning, I waited until I heard the front door's bang announce that my troublesome troublemaker had left before coming out to have my own breakfast. As I sat and consumed yet another cup of vile coffee, I re-read a particular section of The Tin Drum, the chapter entitled The Fiber Rug, in which Oskar attempts sexual intercourse with Sister Dorothea, fails to achieve an erection, and slinks away in shame and humiliation. Then I skipped ahead to the chapter where he acquires Sister Dorothea's finger, a chapter called, appropriately enough, The Ring Finger. (Oskar insists that it was delivered into his hands by an overly zealous dog, who apparently mistook it for a ball during a game of Fetch.)
There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and accurately when detached, when alienated form the center. It was a finger. A woman's finger. A ring finger. A woman's ring finger. A woman's ring finger with an attractive ring on it. Between the metacarpus and the first finger joint, some three-quarters-of-an-inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be chopped off. The section was neat, clearly revealing the tendon of the extensor muscle...Despite the line of dirt, or rather of earth under the nail, as though the finger had been obliged to scratch or dig earth, the nail seemed to have been carefully manicured...The finger felt cold, and its peculiar yellowish pallor also suggested coldness.
Decidedly, I would not go out hunting sunglasses that day.
Well, not, it didn't; that's a lie. I never cried over Gunter Grass's magnum opus. I did write my senior thesis on it when I was doing a double major in German and English in college (and indeed, that was a long, long time ago). For some occult reason, Barnard doesn't offer a degree in comparative literature; hence, the double major. As I recall, I wrote about death and funerals in the novel, after realizing that not a single character in the book dies in what could be described as an even remotely natural fashion - and trust me, there was plenty of material.
I recently picked up the familiar (once you've written a thesis on it, the thing is practically engraved on your heart - Mary Tudor famously remarked that when they opened her up for the autopsy, they would find Calais - the English outpost in France that was lost under her reign - written on her heart; the coroner who gets me is going to find something that reads like a short list of the Harvard Classics) tome and settled in for an entertainingly macabre read. I suppose one could make a case for saying that Grass is an unsung pioneer of Teutonic Magical Realism. Impossible things are always happening in his books, and the reader is asked to swallow quite a lot. To begin with, there's the protagonist, Oskar, who announces in Chapter 1 that he is writing his memoirs from his bed in an insane asylum, thus establishing himself as that character so dear to the hearts of twentieth century novelist - the untrustworthy, antiheroic, first-person narrator who is saying, "Trust me." (You're right -you've met him before, in a Ken Kesey novel.) Generally speaking, when you start off with this set-up, Social Critique is about to descend on you, like a 50 lb. bag of wet laundry falling from the clear blue sky.
Oskar would have us believe that, at the age of three, he made a deliberate decision that he would stop growing, because the grown-ups surrounding him were...well, the whole first half of the book is set during the rise of the Third Reich, so - need I say more? He therefore stages an accident (trap door, root cellar) to explain his failure to thrive, and thereafter communicates primarily by rat-a-tat-tatting on the red-and-white toy tin drum of the title. (Red and white are also big themes, since the book is set in Gdansk/Danzig, and the Poles are trying to keep the place under the red-and-white Polish flag rather than cede it to the red-and-white flag with the big black spider in the middle belonging to the opposition.) Oh - one more unbelievable thing about little Oskar. He can, and does, shatter glass by screaming at it.
I like grotesques. My favorite building in my own neighborhood is on 110th Street and features a quartet of lolling, moping degenerates, rendered into stone by some deranged architectural sculptor, who would do Quasimodo proud. I like Angela Carter novels, with their cast of caricatures straight out of a Tim Burton movie and their wacky, opium-dream-like, S&M flavored scenarios. So I was all set for an enjoyable re-read.
By the time I was partially through the first chapter of the English translation by Ralph Manheim, which is the original translation and therefore around 50 years old, I found myself wanting to look up things in the original German edition to see how the Manheim text compared for accuracy and for overall flavor (for lack of a better word). I was dissatisfied. Unaware that a new translation by Breon Mitchell has hit the shelves and is being lauded as the best available translation, I toyed with the idea of translating the book myself, and I read on from there with an eye towards the somewhat daunting project of rendering its 734 pages into an English version that I would want to read. To this end, I vacillated between the English and the German texts like a distracted little pendulum, clicking my tongue in tut-tutting reproof at some of Manheim's more outré misdemeanors.
But I ultimately decided against it. Why? Not because there was already a new translation on the market - I did not, in fact, discover this until about 15 minutes ago, while writing this post and looking up the name of the original translator online. (At which point, of course, I said to myself, "Well. Good thing I abandoned that project on the drawing board. Wouldn't I have wound up feeling silly!)
No, I'm afraid that the reason was much simpler than that. It was, in fact, the fear that I would lose my reason, were I to take this novel to my heart and spend the next couple of years absorbing myself in it so completely that I would eat, sleep, dream, and breathe The Tin Drum. By the time I was a quarter of the way into it, I was saying to myself, "How is it that I never realized before that this is really a very sick and depressing book?" It must be that one's perspective changes as the years go by; I used to find the misadventures of Dostoevki's characters rather merry. Now, I just think I'd cross the street if I saw them coming.
The reason that Oskar is spinning his tales from a mental ward is that, obsessed with nurses and their white uniforms with the little red cross on the bosom, he has found himself accused of doing away with one Sister Dorothea, whose dismembered finger has been discovered among his possessions. (That finger, Oskar's drumsticks, and a number of other fairly crude phallic symbols pop up their little heads almost as frequently as death, the funerals, and the red-and-white imagery. When Herr Grass finds a symbol he likes, he sticks with it.) Of course, Oskar claims he simply found the finger lying around somewhere (in point of fact, he puts the world's oldest excuse for missing homework in reverse and asserts that a dog gave it to him). Charmed by its visual similarity to those phallic drumsticks that he's always playing with, Oskar simply tucked it into his pocket and strolled home. Whether the reader wants to believe him or not is each individual's call; even in fiction, however, the authorities apparently had a hard time digesting that story.
Meditating on Sister Dorothea and her disjointed digit reminded me of an incident from my own past - again, long, long time ago. The summer of my junior year, in fact. I was doing the summer study abroad thing and had pushed my Eurail pass to its limits - which, in my case, was the Aran Isles, off the western coast of Ireland. (I had seen Man of Aran on PBS and had read J.M. Synge, so there ya go. Literature junkies will go practically anywhere, once they've read about it in a work of fiction.)
I came off the ferry, toting my enormous red backpack, and trudged along until I found a B&B that had a vacancy. The B&B's owner, it seemed, was away, but had left its administration in charge of a neighbor, who assured me that I would sleep very well, as there was only one other guest staying there at the moment, a quiet gentleman of middle years. From Germany, she believed. She undertook to pop in from her own house next door and put a breakfast in front of us in the morning.
The next morning, I was at the deserted breakfast table, having just had a plate of eggs and a rasher of bacon set before me, and was trying to choke down the unpalatable stuff that passed for coffee in Ireland of the early 1980's. I was, of course, reading at the table; the book in my hand was the highly-recognizable paperback edition of Die Blechtrommel. Since I was planning to use it for my thesis, I was getting an early start.
My fellow-lodger entered. I glanced up, found him intolerably old and not at all attractive to my 21 year old eyes, murmured, "Guten Morgen," and went back to my book and the execrable coffee. Perhaps I was showing off a bit - I probably elevated the book slightly, in order to make it quite clear that I was smart in not just one, but two languages.
My companion burst into a positive torrent of German. He was enchanted to meet me, and still more enchanted that I spoke his language so fluently. What was I reading?
I raised my eyebrows and the book slightly higher. "Die Blechtrommel. D'you know it?"
He burst into a cackle, and literally rubbed his hand with glee. "Do I know it? Ha! Gunter Grass! I know him! I went to school with that fellow! Ha! A troublemaker!"
"Oh?" I glanced down at my book, on the back of which was a photograph of the author. It looked remarkably like my interlocutor. "In what way, a troublemaker?"
He grew downright gleeful. "Oh, it's better not to say. Tell me, are you travelling alone?"
I allowed as how I was, which seemed to put him into an even better mood. He rambled on and on, still in German, interrupting himself, repeating himself, explaining himself, digressing in a dozen directions, rambling back to what a coincidence it was to find a young lady sharing his temporary residence, a young lady who was reading that particular novel, a novel by that particular troublemaker Gunter Grass, whom he remembered so well as being a troublemaker from his own days as a schoolboy...
At last, feeling in his shirt pocket, he exclaimed that he must have lost his sunglasses, why, yes, his sunglasses were missing, deuce take it, now where could they be? Ah - he had it - he must have left them on that rock, the rock he'd been climbing yesterday, that very scenic and beautiful rock with the extraordinarily beautiful command of that very scenic vista. Dash it all, he'd have to go back to that rock, that dratted, that wonderful rock, go back and see whether his sunglasses were still there! And wouldn't I like to come along, and help him hunt for his sunglasses?
By now, all the 21-year-old-girl-who-has-gotten used-to-being-sexually-harassed-by-lecherous-middle-aged-men in me was raising its hackles, silently screaming CREEPER! And it wasn't just, regular, run-of-the-mill creepiness. There was a disturbing note of obsession to his insistence that I accompany him to this secluded spot far away from the village. His refusal to take no for an answer grew more and more alarming, and it was with some difficulty that I convinced him that I had other plans that Simply. Would. Not. Wait.
I decided, as I rambled about the island sweetly alone at last, that I was going to make a point of it to avoid my fellow-lodger. Whether or not he was the man in the picture, I neither knew nor cared. All I cared about was that I was spending a second night alone in an otherwise empty house with a Creeper. The other B&B's were full-up, or I'd have grabbed my gear and moved on the spot.
That night, I slipped into my room without encountering him. I was almost asleep, when I thought I heard something stirring on the other side of my locked door. Did I hear the doorknob being tested, ever so gently? I couldn't be sure. It was a long time before I fell asleep.
In the morning, I waited until I heard the front door's bang announce that my troublesome troublemaker had left before coming out to have my own breakfast. As I sat and consumed yet another cup of vile coffee, I re-read a particular section of The Tin Drum, the chapter entitled The Fiber Rug, in which Oskar attempts sexual intercourse with Sister Dorothea, fails to achieve an erection, and slinks away in shame and humiliation. Then I skipped ahead to the chapter where he acquires Sister Dorothea's finger, a chapter called, appropriately enough, The Ring Finger. (Oskar insists that it was delivered into his hands by an overly zealous dog, who apparently mistook it for a ball during a game of Fetch.)
There are parts of the human body which can be examined more easily and accurately when detached, when alienated form the center. It was a finger. A woman's finger. A ring finger. A woman's ring finger. A woman's ring finger with an attractive ring on it. Between the metacarpus and the first finger joint, some three-quarters-of-an-inch below the ring, the finger had allowed itself to be chopped off. The section was neat, clearly revealing the tendon of the extensor muscle...Despite the line of dirt, or rather of earth under the nail, as though the finger had been obliged to scratch or dig earth, the nail seemed to have been carefully manicured...The finger felt cold, and its peculiar yellowish pallor also suggested coldness.
Decidedly, I would not go out hunting sunglasses that day.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The Purloined Post
All right, I totally know it's cheating to keep swiping John Wirenius's blogs and posting them here on my own. But do remember that I has a hand in getting Phineas at Bay to the finish line. As John's Domineditrix-of-Record, I had the ever-increasing pleasure of reading the novel in manuscript three times, and what was Good Read on the first round has turned into a Great Read. Let me put it this way - by the third time around, even though I knew what was going to happen next - because, after all, I am the editor - I was staying up late, and I kept on reading one more chapter...and then another after that...and oh, here comes that delicious bit with Lizzie Eustace trying to smuggle in French lace in the false-bottomed luggage, can't quit here...just a little more, because I do like that description of the Duke's gardens, and...what, dear? It's two a.m.? Oh. Well, I'll be along very soon, don't wait up.
More. Since I am going to publish my own collection of irreverent versified tweaks on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen under the auspices of The Monocle Press, I am very much delighted to see how beautifully the galleys of Phineas at Bay have turned out. I probably shouldn't admit this, but the twelve-year-old-aspiring-writer in me is hopping up and down, clapping her hands and crowing, "It looks like a real book!"
Doesn't it, though?
I just received the proofs of my novel, Phineas at Bay. The cover page is represented above.
It's an extraordinary feeling; I remember when I received the proof ofmy first book, back in 2000, the feeling that this was going to be a real thing in the world. Under my name. For literally anyone to read and judge.
How exciting!
Phineas at Bay, though, is on a whole different order of things. It's a work of fiction, a novel--the very thing I wanted most to do in all the world when I was a young man--yes, be a lawyer, but this, this too--write fiction.
When I tried, in college in law school, I wrote one short story that was good (I still believe), one that was interesting but flawed, and a third light comic turn. And then I dried up. I had nothing to say, yet.
Here's a secret: Every time I sit down to write an article, I wonder: is this the time when the gift leaves me? When I can no longer come up with a fresh, new perspective, and am reduced to rehashing my old pieces? That's why I haven't written anything at length on free speech since 2007--I've covered everything I have to say in the field. (I may have one left in me, more of a memoir about an unusual case, but, seriously--the doctrine has been, except in campaign finance, relatively steady since the second edition of First Amendment, First Principles. I haven't anything jurisprudentially significant to add, for now.)
So, when I decided to have a go at a novel, I did it with no purpose but to write a story for my wife. No pressure, no expectations. I planned to self-publish, and keep the experience fun for me. And then the book wrote. It was exhilarating to do it, and addictive.
It wrote, though, as a third piece in the diptych created by Trollope regarding Phineas Finn (thanks to Nicholas Birns for that metaphor--and for a great blurb on the book.) And to do a Trollope-style novel commits you to a certain scope, one which requires completely blowing by the word count thresholds most literary agents set, let alone the publishers to whom they would pitch it. And, although a dear friend pointed me in the direction of some first rate agents--well, the book is written to an audience that wants a chronicle of some scope. The hard core of the audience--the Anthony Trollope reader, especially, but also the modern analogue--fans of Hillary Mantel, or A.S. Byatt--would feel cheated with a book lacking the capaciousness of the original. I couldn't meet the word count thresholds without cheating the very people who would be most enthusiastic about the work. (In fact, Phineas at Bay is significantly shorter-- 100,000 words shorter--than either of the two original novels, and clocks in at over 170,000 words).
So, a long novel--with a cliffhanger at the end of "Volume I" that I rather fancy, and some good comedy along the way. I was blessed to have a first rate editor, Judith Cummins to design the cover, and the design and marketing team from CreateSpace, who are patient, kind, but best of all, enthusiastic about their work.
We're not quite there yet, but pretty soon, there's going to be an e-book and a hard copy book available for purchase, and I hope a lot of you will visit the author site and store, and shell out for this thing, in one format or the other. Because I hope--no, I think--you might like it.
I hope to have, as Simon Raven memorably put it, arranged words in a pleasing pattern for your enjoyment.
But that will, quite soon now, be for you to decide.
More. Since I am going to publish my own collection of irreverent versified tweaks on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen under the auspices of The Monocle Press, I am very much delighted to see how beautifully the galleys of Phineas at Bay have turned out. I probably shouldn't admit this, but the twelve-year-old-aspiring-writer in me is hopping up and down, clapping her hands and crowing, "It looks like a real book!"
Doesn't it, though?
Phineas on Deck
I just received the proofs of my novel, Phineas at Bay. The cover page is represented above.
It's an extraordinary feeling; I remember when I received the proof ofmy first book, back in 2000, the feeling that this was going to be a real thing in the world. Under my name. For literally anyone to read and judge.
How exciting!
Phineas at Bay, though, is on a whole different order of things. It's a work of fiction, a novel--the very thing I wanted most to do in all the world when I was a young man--yes, be a lawyer, but this, this too--write fiction.
When I tried, in college in law school, I wrote one short story that was good (I still believe), one that was interesting but flawed, and a third light comic turn. And then I dried up. I had nothing to say, yet.
Here's a secret: Every time I sit down to write an article, I wonder: is this the time when the gift leaves me? When I can no longer come up with a fresh, new perspective, and am reduced to rehashing my old pieces? That's why I haven't written anything at length on free speech since 2007--I've covered everything I have to say in the field. (I may have one left in me, more of a memoir about an unusual case, but, seriously--the doctrine has been, except in campaign finance, relatively steady since the second edition of First Amendment, First Principles. I haven't anything jurisprudentially significant to add, for now.)
So, when I decided to have a go at a novel, I did it with no purpose but to write a story for my wife. No pressure, no expectations. I planned to self-publish, and keep the experience fun for me. And then the book wrote. It was exhilarating to do it, and addictive.
It wrote, though, as a third piece in the diptych created by Trollope regarding Phineas Finn (thanks to Nicholas Birns for that metaphor--and for a great blurb on the book.) And to do a Trollope-style novel commits you to a certain scope, one which requires completely blowing by the word count thresholds most literary agents set, let alone the publishers to whom they would pitch it. And, although a dear friend pointed me in the direction of some first rate agents--well, the book is written to an audience that wants a chronicle of some scope. The hard core of the audience--the Anthony Trollope reader, especially, but also the modern analogue--fans of Hillary Mantel, or A.S. Byatt--would feel cheated with a book lacking the capaciousness of the original. I couldn't meet the word count thresholds without cheating the very people who would be most enthusiastic about the work. (In fact, Phineas at Bay is significantly shorter-- 100,000 words shorter--than either of the two original novels, and clocks in at over 170,000 words).
So, a long novel--with a cliffhanger at the end of "Volume I" that I rather fancy, and some good comedy along the way. I was blessed to have a first rate editor, Judith Cummins to design the cover, and the design and marketing team from CreateSpace, who are patient, kind, but best of all, enthusiastic about their work.
We're not quite there yet, but pretty soon, there's going to be an e-book and a hard copy book available for purchase, and I hope a lot of you will visit the author site and store, and shell out for this thing, in one format or the other. Because I hope--no, I think--you might like it.
I hope to have, as Simon Raven memorably put it, arranged words in a pleasing pattern for your enjoyment.
But that will, quite soon now, be for you to decide.
Monday, May 12, 2014
A Good, But Not a Great, Movie
As we head towards crunch time (i.e., packing up 34 years' worth of My History In New York), I hope to keep up with my self-allotted goal of three blog posts a week. We shall see how that goes. Some will probably be short, and I will try to keep the kvetching to a minimum, as it is hardly earth-shattering news that Moving Sucks - if you've so much as moved into a college dorm room, you already know that.
My husband is under the fond misapprehension that we are going to be throwing a lot of things away so as to lighten the load, and I am absolutely fine with that, as long as they are all his things. And yes- I do need the box under the bed that holds the book report on George Washington that I wrote in the third grade - the one with the incredibly awkward crayon drawing of himself crossing the Delaware, ineptly copied from the dust jacket of a Landmark Book entitled Meet George Washington! As dear Judith "Miss Manners" Martin's mother was so fond of remarking, "Be kind to your biographer." My kindness will consist of the fact that only documents that cast me in an unattractive light will be going into the shredder (by my count, two, or, at the most, three pages of notes on a long-ago crush who is now...well... over fifty.)
Speaking of history, and I believe we were - I went to the movies last week, which is something I do very seldom because I am Getting On in Years and thus am outraged at the thought of paying $14 to see a movie, especially since the AARP card that was urged on me when I hit the half-century mark is very deceptive at this stage of the game and won't entitle me to any significant discounts for at least another decade. But - forgive me, I wander, as happens at my age...where were we...? Ah - history.
The film in question was Belle, which has nothing to do with the heroine of that saccharine Disney flick about an interspecies marriage between a bookish French lass and a Beast who apparently keeps a Pilates machine in the basement.
Belle is actually named Dido Elizabeth Belle, and is referred to throughout the film as Dido, so I don't really know what made them call the movie Belle, unless it was that not many contemporary people have heard of the name Dido, and anyway Dido might be confused with Dodo. Since this is not a movie about an extinct bird who run a caucus race with Alice in Wonderland, the filmmakers prudently decided to err on the side of familiarity. Then, too, those film-goers who had suffered through four years of high school Latin would have shown up in the expectation of seeing an eighteenth century version of the Queen of Carthage being seduced and abandoned by a latter-day Aeneas and petulantly stabbing herself at the top of her own funeral pyre, because that would show him. (Wait...that's Tess of the D'Urbervilles...kinda, sorta.)
Belle is based on what is known of the biography of a young woman, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, who was born to a white English nobleman and an enslaved woman named Maria Belle. Maria Belle died when Dido was a small child, and Dido was taken by her father, an Admiral in the British Navy, to be raised side-by-side with her cousin Elizabeth Murray, another quasi-orphan being raised by their mutual great-uncle, William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield. At the mention of Mansfield, all of the Jane Austen fans (q.v. Mansfield Park, 1814) in the audience start thinking in an entirely wrong direction... well, maybe not entirely wrong, since Austen's most irritatingly meek and mealy-mouthed heroine, Fanny Price, is raised side-by-side with her more privileged cousins and is never allowed to forget that her social stature and her consequent value on the marriage market is far lower than theirs, and this is certainly a theme that runs through Belle. Although now that I think of it, Fanny, like Dido, is pursued by a high-class twit whose snobby family thinks he is throwing himself away, simply because he is condescending enough to want to marry her and then spend the rest of their mutual lives rubbing it well in that he "could have done a lot better, so be grateful, dear, and pass me those kippers."
Okay, so maybe the screenwriter's avowed aim of turning Dido Lindsay's story into a Jane Austen piece worked out better than it appeared to have done at first lorgnette-view... although all you have to do is look at the costumes (the film is set in 1779, or maybe it's 1781) to see that this is not the Empire-waisted Austenland that has been such a boon to the Historic Costumer Film Factory. The problem with the script seems to be that it can't quite decide which genre it wants to be. Is this a comedy of manners with the conventional happy ending (i.e., the marriage of the heroine to the only guy in sight who's not totally impossible)? Or is it a scathing critique of eighteenth century Britain's participation in the slave trade? Is it about the disenfranchisement of eighteenth century women, whatever their rank or color may have been? As Dido's cousin Elizabeth observes, Dido, who has been left a fortune - £2,000 per annum, which in those simpler days was Very Big Money - by her father, the Admiral, has increased in value on the marriage market - whereas the equally physically attractive Elizabeth has plummeted precipitously, due to the fact that she has no fortune. Why, Elizabeth wonders, would Dido want to enslave herself by marrying at all, since a married woman and everything she owns becomes the property of her husband? It's a good question, and one that is never answered - contemporary moviegoers mutter, "Biological imperative" and grab another handful of popcorn, squirming in our seats, because B.I. made all of us do stupid things, too.
There are elements of Fanny Burney's Evelina as well, particularly in the Vauxhall scene. I, for one, was delighted to see a cinematic representation of Vauxhall, for the pleasure garden figures heavily both in Evelina and Vanity Fair. In fact, it was while Dido's unsuitable suitor was conferring with his snotty brother (who is all set to woo Cousin Elizabeth, until it turns out that she has no money) as they strolled about the gardens admiring Dido, Elizabeth, and the fireworks, that I suddenly recognized the actor playing the snotty brother and cried out delightedly, "Crikey! It's Draco Malfoy!" As, indeed it was. Blessed or cursed with a countenance that always makes him look like he smells excrement, Tom Felton seems doomed to a lifetime of playing supercilious creeps whose sole mission is to sniff haughtily about the importance of keeping inferiors in their places.
While the movie was visually sumptuous and the actress playing Dido is so lovely as to make one feel churlish for finding fault of any kind, her very beauty was a factor that nagged at me as a flaw - not in her, but in the script. All of the characters are stock characters - within the first two lines of dialogue that comes out of anyone's mouth, we know who's a Good Guy and who's a Bad Guy. Of course it is unfair that Dido is considered less marriageable than her white cousin - but the inference is that the unfairness lies in the fact that, while both are equally pretty, Dido plays the piano better than Elizabeth. Suppose the casting director had made the brave and unconventional decision to have Dido played by an actress who was - not hideous, perhaps - but not outstandingly beautiful, either? A woman, in short, of ordinary beauty. A woman whose greatest beauty lies in her character, her integrity, her intellect, and her daring to defy the conventions of the society that raised her? We are offered a brief glimpse of this quality in the eponymous heroine, but then the camera swoons again over the heroine's chiseled cheekbones and Dido is sacrificed upon the altar of the Happy Ever After ending.
And here, I think, lies the major flaw in this movie - it is simply too pretty. The script goes pussyfooting around some very ugly subjects for fear of becoming ugly and disagreeable to the audience. Dido's Consciousness Raising Moment results from learning of an atrocity on which her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, who is also the Chief Justice of England, is to make a ruling that could affect the British slave trade - the real-life massacre of more than 140 slaves who were thrown overboard from the slave ship Zong so that the owners of the "human cargo" could collect the insurance on their ailing "merchandise" (who, of course were ailing precisely due to the inhuman conditions under which they were being transported.) For the first time, she seems to identify with her matrilineal side, and to realize that, but for a most unusual circumstance, such a fate could have befallen her, as well. Why, I wondered, did the screenwriter choose not to juxtapose scenes of the horror of the massacre with the ultra-civilized breakfast table of the Earl, where Dido makes abortive attempts to assert her new-found consciousness of the fact that her privileged upbringing as the niece - illegitimate, but still acknowledged - of an Earl means she would never be exposed to such atrocities, but that she is now aware of societal ills that had never troubled her hitherto? As the details of the massacre were related by the actors, I had no trouble imagining what it would have been like to be in that situation - sick, tortured, kidnapped from my home and all I hold dear, and finally forced overboard to my death, shackled, helpless to save myself. My inner eye saw it all vividly, and I was sick with this fresh evidence of the abominations mankind has perpetrated in the pursuit of wealth and power over other human beings. Why not show what would surely have flashed with equal vividness through Dido's mind?
All of which is not to say that I disliked the film - far from it. It held my interest, although there were very few surprises, and there was nothing objectionable to be found in its hour and forty-five minutes. It was easy on the eye in every possible way - the people, the scenery, the architecture, the costumes - all very pretty. But it nags at me that, while it is a good film, it ought to have been a great film - and is not.
B+, and we await this filmmakers next effort with interest.
My husband is under the fond misapprehension that we are going to be throwing a lot of things away so as to lighten the load, and I am absolutely fine with that, as long as they are all his things. And yes- I do need the box under the bed that holds the book report on George Washington that I wrote in the third grade - the one with the incredibly awkward crayon drawing of himself crossing the Delaware, ineptly copied from the dust jacket of a Landmark Book entitled Meet George Washington! As dear Judith "Miss Manners" Martin's mother was so fond of remarking, "Be kind to your biographer." My kindness will consist of the fact that only documents that cast me in an unattractive light will be going into the shredder (by my count, two, or, at the most, three pages of notes on a long-ago crush who is now...well... over fifty.)
Speaking of history, and I believe we were - I went to the movies last week, which is something I do very seldom because I am Getting On in Years and thus am outraged at the thought of paying $14 to see a movie, especially since the AARP card that was urged on me when I hit the half-century mark is very deceptive at this stage of the game and won't entitle me to any significant discounts for at least another decade. But - forgive me, I wander, as happens at my age...where were we...? Ah - history.
The film in question was Belle, which has nothing to do with the heroine of that saccharine Disney flick about an interspecies marriage between a bookish French lass and a Beast who apparently keeps a Pilates machine in the basement.
Belle is actually named Dido Elizabeth Belle, and is referred to throughout the film as Dido, so I don't really know what made them call the movie Belle, unless it was that not many contemporary people have heard of the name Dido, and anyway Dido might be confused with Dodo. Since this is not a movie about an extinct bird who run a caucus race with Alice in Wonderland, the filmmakers prudently decided to err on the side of familiarity. Then, too, those film-goers who had suffered through four years of high school Latin would have shown up in the expectation of seeing an eighteenth century version of the Queen of Carthage being seduced and abandoned by a latter-day Aeneas and petulantly stabbing herself at the top of her own funeral pyre, because that would show him. (Wait...that's Tess of the D'Urbervilles...kinda, sorta.)
Belle is based on what is known of the biography of a young woman, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, who was born to a white English nobleman and an enslaved woman named Maria Belle. Maria Belle died when Dido was a small child, and Dido was taken by her father, an Admiral in the British Navy, to be raised side-by-side with her cousin Elizabeth Murray, another quasi-orphan being raised by their mutual great-uncle, William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield. At the mention of Mansfield, all of the Jane Austen fans (q.v. Mansfield Park, 1814) in the audience start thinking in an entirely wrong direction... well, maybe not entirely wrong, since Austen's most irritatingly meek and mealy-mouthed heroine, Fanny Price, is raised side-by-side with her more privileged cousins and is never allowed to forget that her social stature and her consequent value on the marriage market is far lower than theirs, and this is certainly a theme that runs through Belle. Although now that I think of it, Fanny, like Dido, is pursued by a high-class twit whose snobby family thinks he is throwing himself away, simply because he is condescending enough to want to marry her and then spend the rest of their mutual lives rubbing it well in that he "could have done a lot better, so be grateful, dear, and pass me those kippers."
Okay, so maybe the screenwriter's avowed aim of turning Dido Lindsay's story into a Jane Austen piece worked out better than it appeared to have done at first lorgnette-view... although all you have to do is look at the costumes (the film is set in 1779, or maybe it's 1781) to see that this is not the Empire-waisted Austenland that has been such a boon to the Historic Costumer Film Factory. The problem with the script seems to be that it can't quite decide which genre it wants to be. Is this a comedy of manners with the conventional happy ending (i.e., the marriage of the heroine to the only guy in sight who's not totally impossible)? Or is it a scathing critique of eighteenth century Britain's participation in the slave trade? Is it about the disenfranchisement of eighteenth century women, whatever their rank or color may have been? As Dido's cousin Elizabeth observes, Dido, who has been left a fortune - £2,000 per annum, which in those simpler days was Very Big Money - by her father, the Admiral, has increased in value on the marriage market - whereas the equally physically attractive Elizabeth has plummeted precipitously, due to the fact that she has no fortune. Why, Elizabeth wonders, would Dido want to enslave herself by marrying at all, since a married woman and everything she owns becomes the property of her husband? It's a good question, and one that is never answered - contemporary moviegoers mutter, "Biological imperative" and grab another handful of popcorn, squirming in our seats, because B.I. made all of us do stupid things, too.
There are elements of Fanny Burney's Evelina as well, particularly in the Vauxhall scene. I, for one, was delighted to see a cinematic representation of Vauxhall, for the pleasure garden figures heavily both in Evelina and Vanity Fair. In fact, it was while Dido's unsuitable suitor was conferring with his snotty brother (who is all set to woo Cousin Elizabeth, until it turns out that she has no money) as they strolled about the gardens admiring Dido, Elizabeth, and the fireworks, that I suddenly recognized the actor playing the snotty brother and cried out delightedly, "Crikey! It's Draco Malfoy!" As, indeed it was. Blessed or cursed with a countenance that always makes him look like he smells excrement, Tom Felton seems doomed to a lifetime of playing supercilious creeps whose sole mission is to sniff haughtily about the importance of keeping inferiors in their places.
While the movie was visually sumptuous and the actress playing Dido is so lovely as to make one feel churlish for finding fault of any kind, her very beauty was a factor that nagged at me as a flaw - not in her, but in the script. All of the characters are stock characters - within the first two lines of dialogue that comes out of anyone's mouth, we know who's a Good Guy and who's a Bad Guy. Of course it is unfair that Dido is considered less marriageable than her white cousin - but the inference is that the unfairness lies in the fact that, while both are equally pretty, Dido plays the piano better than Elizabeth. Suppose the casting director had made the brave and unconventional decision to have Dido played by an actress who was - not hideous, perhaps - but not outstandingly beautiful, either? A woman, in short, of ordinary beauty. A woman whose greatest beauty lies in her character, her integrity, her intellect, and her daring to defy the conventions of the society that raised her? We are offered a brief glimpse of this quality in the eponymous heroine, but then the camera swoons again over the heroine's chiseled cheekbones and Dido is sacrificed upon the altar of the Happy Ever After ending.
And here, I think, lies the major flaw in this movie - it is simply too pretty. The script goes pussyfooting around some very ugly subjects for fear of becoming ugly and disagreeable to the audience. Dido's Consciousness Raising Moment results from learning of an atrocity on which her great-uncle, Lord Mansfield, who is also the Chief Justice of England, is to make a ruling that could affect the British slave trade - the real-life massacre of more than 140 slaves who were thrown overboard from the slave ship Zong so that the owners of the "human cargo" could collect the insurance on their ailing "merchandise" (who, of course were ailing precisely due to the inhuman conditions under which they were being transported.) For the first time, she seems to identify with her matrilineal side, and to realize that, but for a most unusual circumstance, such a fate could have befallen her, as well. Why, I wondered, did the screenwriter choose not to juxtapose scenes of the horror of the massacre with the ultra-civilized breakfast table of the Earl, where Dido makes abortive attempts to assert her new-found consciousness of the fact that her privileged upbringing as the niece - illegitimate, but still acknowledged - of an Earl means she would never be exposed to such atrocities, but that she is now aware of societal ills that had never troubled her hitherto? As the details of the massacre were related by the actors, I had no trouble imagining what it would have been like to be in that situation - sick, tortured, kidnapped from my home and all I hold dear, and finally forced overboard to my death, shackled, helpless to save myself. My inner eye saw it all vividly, and I was sick with this fresh evidence of the abominations mankind has perpetrated in the pursuit of wealth and power over other human beings. Why not show what would surely have flashed with equal vividness through Dido's mind?
All of which is not to say that I disliked the film - far from it. It held my interest, although there were very few surprises, and there was nothing objectionable to be found in its hour and forty-five minutes. It was easy on the eye in every possible way - the people, the scenery, the architecture, the costumes - all very pretty. But it nags at me that, while it is a good film, it ought to have been a great film - and is not.
B+, and we await this filmmakers next effort with interest.
Friday, May 9, 2014
Heeeeere's Johnny!
And here's my partner-in-crime, John Wirenius, on "The Rivals," after we were both amusedly outraged by an idiot review in the New York Times today. The Times theater critics are becoming useful only in that, if they pan it, I know I should go see it, as their taste is clearly no rule for my own.
http://anglocatontheprowl.blogspot.com/2014/05/did-we-see-same-show-rivals.html?spref=fb
OK - that link didn't post, and I'll cop to it, I'm technostupid. Advice will be welcome. Meanwhile, let's try the ol' copy-and-paste:
http://anglocatontheprowl.blogspot.com/2014/05/did-we-see-same-show-rivals.html?spref=fb
OK - that link didn't post, and I'll cop to it, I'm technostupid. Advice will be welcome. Meanwhile, let's try the ol' copy-and-paste:
I had initially planned to write up my most recent play-going experience, but my partner in crime beat me to it. So I didn't. There, that'll teach you, hmmm….? Quonk? (OK, that's more Sir John Tresizethan William Hartnell, but what would you?)
And then, I read yesterday's review by David Rooney of The Pear Theatre's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals. Quoth Mr. Rooney:
That said, Eighteenth Century comedy could be excessive in its love or wit and wordplay, and sometimes was done in an artificial manner utterly disconnected from human life--Blackadder had some fun with the notion:
--and, several rather irritating people behind us expressed themselves displeased with the play because "Sheridan should be more mannered."
Absolute rubbish. Sheridan in fact fought two duels in 1772 with a rival suitor for his wife, and was seriously wounded in the second duel. That experience colors The Rivals, staged less than three years later. The theme does not concern, as Rooney's review hints that it does, the harms of too much novel-reading (a theory limited to women as expressed by Sir Anthony Absolute in the play, and he's not exactly an oracular figure in the text), but is rather best summed up by its most sensible character, Julia, who replies to her over-romantic friend Lydia's declaration that "our happiness is now as unalloyed as general," with a caution:
Sheridan nearly lost his life to just such passion, in a situation not too different from that in which Jack Absolute finds himself; the notion that this play should be played in a brittle, artificial manner is, frankly, at odds with the text. By bringing life into the play without losing the elements of farce,the Pearl Theater Company did Sheridan justice, and should be proud.
As Karen noted, I tried to start a standing ovation. It was well earned.
And then, I read yesterday's review by David Rooney of The Pear Theatre's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals. Quoth Mr. Rooney:
Restoration comedy, however, is tricky, requiring a canny balance of theatrical artifice and delicacy to animate its wit, wordplay and satirical irreverence. Push too hard, as this cast tends to do, and it lands with a thud. This is language to be savored for its playfulness, not bellowed with declamatory bluster.Now, I am no Sheridan expert, but I was an English major, and studied Eighteenth Century literature with Verlyn Kilinkenborg (who deplored my going to law school, kindly saying he thought I'd make a literature scholar), and I can tell you this: For once, Wikipedia is right: Restoration comedy spans 50 years, 1660-1710, that is, from the Restoration of the Monarchy (that'd be Charles II, in 1660, d'ye see) to 1710. The Rivals (1775), is a Georgian comedy of manners.
***
Mr. Donaldson deploys droll charm in the central role, and Ms. Love has an amusing way with a petulant flounce. There are also lonely notes of understatement from Ms. Botchan and Mr. McNall. But for the most part, the buoyancy is pummeled out of the play by all the shouting, straining and busy gesticulating of the colorfully outfitted and bewigged cast.
That said, Eighteenth Century comedy could be excessive in its love or wit and wordplay, and sometimes was done in an artificial manner utterly disconnected from human life--Blackadder had some fun with the notion:
--and, several rather irritating people behind us expressed themselves displeased with the play because "Sheridan should be more mannered."
Absolute rubbish. Sheridan in fact fought two duels in 1772 with a rival suitor for his wife, and was seriously wounded in the second duel. That experience colors The Rivals, staged less than three years later. The theme does not concern, as Rooney's review hints that it does, the harms of too much novel-reading (a theory limited to women as expressed by Sir Anthony Absolute in the play, and he's not exactly an oracular figure in the text), but is rather best summed up by its most sensible character, Julia, who replies to her over-romantic friend Lydia's declaration that "our happiness is now as unalloyed as general," with a caution:
Then let us study to preserve it so : and whileJulia's words (and not the frivolous epilogue the author tacks on at the end) makes the point surely--in this play, "ill-judging passion" creates a series of potential, all too unnecessary, tragedies, whether that passion be the arbitrary "frenzy" of Sir Anthony Absolute--a sort of infantile temper tantrum done to indulge his own desire to be at the center of all things, the morbid pre-disposition of Faulkner to find betrayal and calamity at every turn, the fire-eating desire for dueling, on any pretext, of Sir Lucius O'Toole, Lydia's romantic desire for dramatic martyrdom, or the intellectual pretensions of Mrs. Malaprop. None of these characters is, at bottom, presented as evil--they all have charming moments. But each in his or her own way invites tragedy by rejecting the good in life that is offered to them, in preference of giving way to ill-judged passion.
Hope pictures to us a flattering scene of future bliss,
let us deny its pencil those colours which are too bright to be lasting.
When hearts deserving happiness would
unite their fortunes, Virtue would crown them with an
unfading garland of modest hurtless flowers : but ill-
judging Passion will force the gaudier rose into the
wreath, whose thorn offends them when its leaves are
dropped!
Sheridan nearly lost his life to just such passion, in a situation not too different from that in which Jack Absolute finds himself; the notion that this play should be played in a brittle, artificial manner is, frankly, at odds with the text. By bringing life into the play without losing the elements of farce,the Pearl Theater Company did Sheridan justice, and should be proud.
As Karen noted, I tried to start a standing ovation. It was well earned.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Forever Blowing Bubbles
I hate to say this, but I've been too busy packing, scheduling the movers, and picking up great deals on kitchen base cabinets on Craigslist to be seriously wicked this week. I have slacked off in my wickedness to such an extent that I even went to yoga again. (What can I say? You got 5 classes with this Groupon, and whether I actually like yoga or not, by God I paid for those classes!)
Fortunately, my dog is more than happy to take up the slack in the Wickedness department.
Milady (so-named for Milady de Winter of The Three Musketeers renown - an equally beautiful and enchanting femme fatale who is just adept as our dog at covering her tracks and casting the blame upon others whenever she's done something truly appalling) is either unable, or unwilling, to grasp that the change of seasons and the concomitant earlier rising of the sun does not necessarily entail the earlier rising of her owners (or, as she calls us, the servants). In the past week alone, I have been rudely nudged with a wet nose, repeatedly whacked by an impatient paw, loomed at, stood upon, and finally robbed of my blankets. (No...no... Not by my husband. Stop that.)
Darling Mrs. Wumples (which is Milady's other name, when we are fond of her, which is practically always, despite her great wickedness) is also adept at thieving and scrounging when it comes to food. Having been raised by an animal hoarder who had about 40 cats in a small apartment in the projects of the South Bronx, she learned some rather deplorable foraging habits in her youth, some of them involving garbage cans and even, on occasion, toilets. Last week I was at the theater waiting for the curtain to go up when I received the following text from my son:
Toilet clogged. Dog fished everything out & dropped it on floor. Where do you keep the mop?
I only had about a minute to text back that he ought to know by the age of 18 where the mop is kept and if he didn't, then I'd neglected my duty as a parent, and that I was going to put that dog in her crate until her whiskers turned white the second I got home, and -
Luckily for all concerned, that's when the curtain went up, and The Rivals was excellent, so by the time I got home I was in a good mood again and my son had found the mop and That Dog was grinning at me ingratiatingly, her breath slightly worse than usual. (I try to brush her teeth, but whenever she sees the toothbrush, she runs into the kitchen, lies on her back and turns her head to one side so that it's under the the kitchen cabinet and I can't reach her teeth.)
They say that border collies are the most intelligent breed. I. of course, cannot say with any certainty whether this is so. I can say that Milady, who looks as though she is the love child of a border collie who forgot her breeding and ran off with a corgi - who, I believe, must have stood on a bench in order to achieve that mad, sweet coupling - has a truly remarkable vocabulary, being able to distinguish between her Mr. Bill chew toy (who realistically wails "Ohhhh, nooooo!" whenever he falls into her punishing jaws) and Professor Grubbly-Plank, a one-eyed woolly toy sheep we found in the park and named for his extreme state of filthiness before putting him through the washing the machine.
So I don't know whether her latest act of wickedness was in response to our unkind complaints about toilet breath. It's entirely possible. I'm not ruling it out. Nevertheless - I'm just saying that I found it disconcerting to get home Monday at noon and find the bathtub full of little brown paw-prints, the liquid soap dispenser overturned, and the soap-dish that had recently contained the pleasantly-scented bar of hotel soap (souvenir of our last vacation) lying - chipped, forlorn, and empty - in the bathtub.
When I was a little girl, if I forgot myself so far as to say a bad word, the threat was that Mother would wash my mouth out with soap. I am sorry to have to tell you that, in the case of Mrs. Wumples, soap-eating appears to be an amusement, rather than a punishment.
She never had a single ill effect - not even an upset stomach - and her breath has smelt faintly of lavender ever since.
Fortunately, my dog is more than happy to take up the slack in the Wickedness department.
Milady (so-named for Milady de Winter of The Three Musketeers renown - an equally beautiful and enchanting femme fatale who is just adept as our dog at covering her tracks and casting the blame upon others whenever she's done something truly appalling) is either unable, or unwilling, to grasp that the change of seasons and the concomitant earlier rising of the sun does not necessarily entail the earlier rising of her owners (or, as she calls us, the servants). In the past week alone, I have been rudely nudged with a wet nose, repeatedly whacked by an impatient paw, loomed at, stood upon, and finally robbed of my blankets. (No...no... Not by my husband. Stop that.)
Darling Mrs. Wumples (which is Milady's other name, when we are fond of her, which is practically always, despite her great wickedness) is also adept at thieving and scrounging when it comes to food. Having been raised by an animal hoarder who had about 40 cats in a small apartment in the projects of the South Bronx, she learned some rather deplorable foraging habits in her youth, some of them involving garbage cans and even, on occasion, toilets. Last week I was at the theater waiting for the curtain to go up when I received the following text from my son:
Toilet clogged. Dog fished everything out & dropped it on floor. Where do you keep the mop?
I only had about a minute to text back that he ought to know by the age of 18 where the mop is kept and if he didn't, then I'd neglected my duty as a parent, and that I was going to put that dog in her crate until her whiskers turned white the second I got home, and -
Luckily for all concerned, that's when the curtain went up, and The Rivals was excellent, so by the time I got home I was in a good mood again and my son had found the mop and That Dog was grinning at me ingratiatingly, her breath slightly worse than usual. (I try to brush her teeth, but whenever she sees the toothbrush, she runs into the kitchen, lies on her back and turns her head to one side so that it's under the the kitchen cabinet and I can't reach her teeth.)
They say that border collies are the most intelligent breed. I. of course, cannot say with any certainty whether this is so. I can say that Milady, who looks as though she is the love child of a border collie who forgot her breeding and ran off with a corgi - who, I believe, must have stood on a bench in order to achieve that mad, sweet coupling - has a truly remarkable vocabulary, being able to distinguish between her Mr. Bill chew toy (who realistically wails "Ohhhh, nooooo!" whenever he falls into her punishing jaws) and Professor Grubbly-Plank, a one-eyed woolly toy sheep we found in the park and named for his extreme state of filthiness before putting him through the washing the machine.
So I don't know whether her latest act of wickedness was in response to our unkind complaints about toilet breath. It's entirely possible. I'm not ruling it out. Nevertheless - I'm just saying that I found it disconcerting to get home Monday at noon and find the bathtub full of little brown paw-prints, the liquid soap dispenser overturned, and the soap-dish that had recently contained the pleasantly-scented bar of hotel soap (souvenir of our last vacation) lying - chipped, forlorn, and empty - in the bathtub.
When I was a little girl, if I forgot myself so far as to say a bad word, the threat was that Mother would wash my mouth out with soap. I am sorry to have to tell you that, in the case of Mrs. Wumples, soap-eating appears to be an amusement, rather than a punishment.
She never had a single ill effect - not even an upset stomach - and her breath has smelt faintly of lavender ever since.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Cider in My Ear
I can't believe I fell for it. Me. The scam-savvy New Yorker. Always with one hand lightly covering my wallet (front jeans pocket - much harder to get at unnoticed) as I hang onto the subway strap with the other. Always giving the three-card monte dealers a wide berth. Always hitting DELETE with that cool, supercilious sneer when I receive the email claiming that my son (who is fast asleep in the next room) finds himself destitute and passport-less in Prague, begging me to provide my credit card number at once in order to save him from sleeping under a leaky bridge, where he will undoubtedly be sexually ravished again and again, after being forcibly injected with drugs not legally available in the United States.
But - they got me. They got me. They got me good. They got me with a little postcard that offered me two free airfares, or a free stay at Great Wolf Lodge. And all I had to do was listen to a boring 90 minute sales pitch for a timeshare, somewhere out in the Poconos.
Well - it's springtime. And the Poconos are pretty in the springtime. And I know how to say, "No, thanks" and I know how to keep saying "No, thanks," for 90 minutes, right? And it's a Sunday, and we're not doing anything else, and my Brother the Lifelong Bachelor has been hocking us to come see the enormous house he bought in California and stay in one of his four guestrooms, because for a week he can sacrifice the joy of rattling around in that great big house all by himself for the sake of Family. I don't want to stay at Great Wolf Lodge, because I already did that when my son was 11, and I already know that Great Wolf Lodge is no place for adults who are not trying to make a child under the age of 12 happy (as opposed to making themselves happy) while on vacation. But free airfares? Hey! What could be the downside? What's the worst that could happen? Right? Right?
The worst of it is, I know perfectly well that "You can't cheat an honest man." And that, "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is." And even, "If somebody is offering you something valuable for nothing, you should run like hell in the other direction, because there's definitely a hidden agenda and it will turn out there is more in it for them than there is for you, if you are greedy and stupid enough to accept."
But I did my homework. I asked all the right questions over the phone when I set up the appointment. Hell - I even put my husband on with their operator, and he asked the questions I hadn't thought to ask. It all sounded okay, so I called up my friend Carrie and said, "Hey, you want to drive out to the Poconos with us and be bored by a timeshare pitch so we can get free airline tickets and a $100 dining card? Afterwards we can grab lunch and then drive up to the new house and see how the bathrooms are turning out." Carrie, the darling, is always up for the impromptu adventure, so off we toddled.
The drive to the resort took almost 2 hours, and along the way we had time to relate in detail all the timeshare pitch horror stories that had happened to us, to our friends, and to our families. The countryside was nice enough, but the area was depressed - lots of ramshackle houses and farms that needed nothing more than a fairly strong gust of wind to turn them into kindling. Rusted-out automobiles in the front yards. The kind of ambiance that really says luxury vacation resort.
We were gaping at each other and saying, "Are they kidding?" before we even got to the Lodge, or whatever it was called. The timeshares turned out to be little prefab trailer homes that had been plunked down here and there on a large tract of Absolutely Nothing. The Lodge reminded me of the YMCA in my home town in the 1960's. There was a sad little swimming pool right behind it that was shaped like a bow-tie pasta noodle and had all of its painting peeling off; with a tiny peeling in-ground whirlpool tub to match sitting desolately to one side. To welcome us on that true luxury resort pampering note, somebody had set out a plastic bowl of generic potato chips and a pile of paper plates.
Having come this far, Carrie decided she might as well get her free airline tickets, too, so she blandly announced she'd forgotten her voucher but would come along for the tour. The elderly youth behind the desk looked flustered and asked whether we had all traveled together. Surprised, we allowed as how we'd traveled in the same car, but were of different households and addresses, and the elderly youth, growing still more flustered, announced that, this being the case, Carrie could take the tour, but the rules of the Free Gift specifically prohibited arriving in the same car, and so, alas, she was ineligible for free airline tickets.
With that fine, stern hauteur that I have seen Carrie produce whenever the occasion seems to warrant it, Carrie announced in return that she had been going to buy a timeshare; that she had been yearning to buy a timeshare; that she had arrived, checkbook in hand, with the firm intention of buying a timeshare - but, if that was they way he was going to be, then she would buy no timeshare, no, neither on this day nor any other. And that, moreover, her two dear friends would not be buying any timeshares, either. We would take the tour. We would listen to the sales pitch. We would collect our free airfares, not to mention the hundred dollar gift certificate to the Fine Dining Establishment of Our Choice. But she would personally guarantee that no timeshare would be bought by any one of the three of us on that ill-starred Sunday.
We then retired to the Naugahyde sofas to await our turn to "get this bullshit over with," as we muttered to one another.
As we waited, the room began to fill up. More and more nervous-looking people trotted in, print-outs in hand, to grab at the brass ring. I couldn't help noticing that most of the people who came in looked like they didn't have a lot of money that they could comfortably afford to lose. Many of them had children in tow; you could see that they were here because taking their kids on a two-night stay at an indoor water park was a splurge they normally wouldn't have indulged in. Anxiety was in the air. Behind the glass wall of the waiting room, I could see the salespeople. They didn't look like they liked their jobs. They merely looked like they didn't have enough money to live on if they didn't put on a cheap business suit and try to peddle a white elephant to people who had as little as, or maybe even less than, they did.
Ours were the first names called. A hard-faced woman, dislike for us, her job, and everyone on earth deeply etched on every lineament, summoned the three of us into an office marked MANAGER. Surveying us in the way she might have surveyed a colony of bedbugs that had just turned up under the cushions of a secondhand sofa she'd been about to buy, she informed us that she understood that we were not happy with the fact that Carrie was ineligible for the the Free Gift. We agreed that we were Not Happy. She said that there was a backlog of clients on the other side of that glass wall, feverishly awaiting their guided tour of Shangri-la so they could buy their timeshares, and so she was willing to award my husband and me our Free Gift without forcing us to endure the tedium of the 90 minute sales pitch and send us on our way.
"And the hundred dollar dining card, of course," I said.
"Of course," she said horridly, and went off for our voucher. This turned out to be a computer printout enclosed in a flimsy folder of magazine-grade gloss stock embellished with pictures of palm trees. It was also the voucher for Great Wolf Lodge trip, and I pointed out her mistake, and she apologized still more horridly and came back with a different computer printout. We thanked her nicely and took our departure.
Before we left, Carrie and I went downstairs to use the Ladies' Room - an opulent affair boasting three stalls with metal doors exactly like the ones I recall as being in my high school's bathrooms in the late 1970's. Carrie went to rinse her hands and started laughing hysterically, pointing at the bunch of artificial flowers meant to enliven the sink, upon which somebody had propped a handwritten note:
But - they got me. They got me. They got me good. They got me with a little postcard that offered me two free airfares, or a free stay at Great Wolf Lodge. And all I had to do was listen to a boring 90 minute sales pitch for a timeshare, somewhere out in the Poconos.
Well - it's springtime. And the Poconos are pretty in the springtime. And I know how to say, "No, thanks" and I know how to keep saying "No, thanks," for 90 minutes, right? And it's a Sunday, and we're not doing anything else, and my Brother the Lifelong Bachelor has been hocking us to come see the enormous house he bought in California and stay in one of his four guestrooms, because for a week he can sacrifice the joy of rattling around in that great big house all by himself for the sake of Family. I don't want to stay at Great Wolf Lodge, because I already did that when my son was 11, and I already know that Great Wolf Lodge is no place for adults who are not trying to make a child under the age of 12 happy (as opposed to making themselves happy) while on vacation. But free airfares? Hey! What could be the downside? What's the worst that could happen? Right? Right?
The worst of it is, I know perfectly well that "You can't cheat an honest man." And that, "If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is." And even, "If somebody is offering you something valuable for nothing, you should run like hell in the other direction, because there's definitely a hidden agenda and it will turn out there is more in it for them than there is for you, if you are greedy and stupid enough to accept."
But I did my homework. I asked all the right questions over the phone when I set up the appointment. Hell - I even put my husband on with their operator, and he asked the questions I hadn't thought to ask. It all sounded okay, so I called up my friend Carrie and said, "Hey, you want to drive out to the Poconos with us and be bored by a timeshare pitch so we can get free airline tickets and a $100 dining card? Afterwards we can grab lunch and then drive up to the new house and see how the bathrooms are turning out." Carrie, the darling, is always up for the impromptu adventure, so off we toddled.
The drive to the resort took almost 2 hours, and along the way we had time to relate in detail all the timeshare pitch horror stories that had happened to us, to our friends, and to our families. The countryside was nice enough, but the area was depressed - lots of ramshackle houses and farms that needed nothing more than a fairly strong gust of wind to turn them into kindling. Rusted-out automobiles in the front yards. The kind of ambiance that really says luxury vacation resort.
We were gaping at each other and saying, "Are they kidding?" before we even got to the Lodge, or whatever it was called. The timeshares turned out to be little prefab trailer homes that had been plunked down here and there on a large tract of Absolutely Nothing. The Lodge reminded me of the YMCA in my home town in the 1960's. There was a sad little swimming pool right behind it that was shaped like a bow-tie pasta noodle and had all of its painting peeling off; with a tiny peeling in-ground whirlpool tub to match sitting desolately to one side. To welcome us on that true luxury resort pampering note, somebody had set out a plastic bowl of generic potato chips and a pile of paper plates.
Having come this far, Carrie decided she might as well get her free airline tickets, too, so she blandly announced she'd forgotten her voucher but would come along for the tour. The elderly youth behind the desk looked flustered and asked whether we had all traveled together. Surprised, we allowed as how we'd traveled in the same car, but were of different households and addresses, and the elderly youth, growing still more flustered, announced that, this being the case, Carrie could take the tour, but the rules of the Free Gift specifically prohibited arriving in the same car, and so, alas, she was ineligible for free airline tickets.
With that fine, stern hauteur that I have seen Carrie produce whenever the occasion seems to warrant it, Carrie announced in return that she had been going to buy a timeshare; that she had been yearning to buy a timeshare; that she had arrived, checkbook in hand, with the firm intention of buying a timeshare - but, if that was they way he was going to be, then she would buy no timeshare, no, neither on this day nor any other. And that, moreover, her two dear friends would not be buying any timeshares, either. We would take the tour. We would listen to the sales pitch. We would collect our free airfares, not to mention the hundred dollar gift certificate to the Fine Dining Establishment of Our Choice. But she would personally guarantee that no timeshare would be bought by any one of the three of us on that ill-starred Sunday.
We then retired to the Naugahyde sofas to await our turn to "get this bullshit over with," as we muttered to one another.
As we waited, the room began to fill up. More and more nervous-looking people trotted in, print-outs in hand, to grab at the brass ring. I couldn't help noticing that most of the people who came in looked like they didn't have a lot of money that they could comfortably afford to lose. Many of them had children in tow; you could see that they were here because taking their kids on a two-night stay at an indoor water park was a splurge they normally wouldn't have indulged in. Anxiety was in the air. Behind the glass wall of the waiting room, I could see the salespeople. They didn't look like they liked their jobs. They merely looked like they didn't have enough money to live on if they didn't put on a cheap business suit and try to peddle a white elephant to people who had as little as, or maybe even less than, they did.
Ours were the first names called. A hard-faced woman, dislike for us, her job, and everyone on earth deeply etched on every lineament, summoned the three of us into an office marked MANAGER. Surveying us in the way she might have surveyed a colony of bedbugs that had just turned up under the cushions of a secondhand sofa she'd been about to buy, she informed us that she understood that we were not happy with the fact that Carrie was ineligible for the the Free Gift. We agreed that we were Not Happy. She said that there was a backlog of clients on the other side of that glass wall, feverishly awaiting their guided tour of Shangri-la so they could buy their timeshares, and so she was willing to award my husband and me our Free Gift without forcing us to endure the tedium of the 90 minute sales pitch and send us on our way.
"And the hundred dollar dining card, of course," I said.
"Of course," she said horridly, and went off for our voucher. This turned out to be a computer printout enclosed in a flimsy folder of magazine-grade gloss stock embellished with pictures of palm trees. It was also the voucher for Great Wolf Lodge trip, and I pointed out her mistake, and she apologized still more horridly and came back with a different computer printout. We thanked her nicely and took our departure.
Before we left, Carrie and I went downstairs to use the Ladies' Room - an opulent affair boasting three stalls with metal doors exactly like the ones I recall as being in my high school's bathrooms in the late 1970's. Carrie went to rinse her hands and started laughing hysterically, pointing at the bunch of artificial flowers meant to enliven the sink, upon which somebody had propped a handwritten note:
DON'T BUY
IT'S A SCAM!
In the car, I read the Fine Print, of which there was a considerable amount. We were required to fork over $75 per person in Fees, half of it payable within the next 21 days, the rest upon making our airline reservations, and to agree to pay any other Taxes and Fees that might arise. We were darkly warned that if we did not send a money order for $75 via Certified Mail within the next 21 days, our Free Gift would become Null and Void.
As for the Dining Card, it turned out that it was, in fact, good in quite a number of reasonably decent restaurants - we just had to spend an equal amount in order to use it. In short, it was a 50% Off card, good for up to $100.
I wish I could say that at this point, I had simply laughed, cut my losses (a tank of gas, an afternoon on the road, and a lunch in a Pennsylvania diner I wouldn't have had to buy if I'd torn up the silly postcard in the first place) and shredded the voucher. But no. Painful and embarrassing as this is to confess, I actually stopped at the bank and got a $75 money order this morning. Luckily for me, my particular bank doesn't charge a fee for money orders.
And here, in my particular case, is where the scam stopped. Why? Because, faced with the fact that I was next going to have to stand in one of those interminable post office lines to send the money order off by certified mail, I finally decided to do the sensible thing and first get online to investigate any consumer complaints that might exist regarding the travel agency that handled the "free airline tickets" vouchers. What I found was hair-raising.
The Better Business Bureau gives this company an F. Customer complaints amply document how they earned it. Same story as mine - it was just that the people who did follow through and mail their vouchers in with those money orders unwittingly embarked on a nightmare mess in which they were incessantly nickled and dimed for one sum after another, the promised tickets never appearing, because the company had the option to say that there were no availabilities on the two dates you were permitted to select at a time, and because they were allowed to take 45 days to tell you so. Since the vouchers expire within 18 months, and since they hit you up for more money each time you try to make the reservation, some of which is non-refundable, they have a nice little shell game going. And since all of this is presented to you in writing, in clear and comprehensible language, albeit in minuscule print, and since you fork over the money in small increments as you go further and further along the path the perdition, they have no legal liability and you can't claim you were scammed.
The success of this scheme relies on the very sound psychological principles that:
(1) Most people want to get something for nothing. Especially if it's dressed up to look like it's foolproof.
(2) Once these same people have invested something in this "free" item - whether it be money, time, energy, or what have you - they will be extremely reluctant to abandon the quest for the carrot at the end of the stick, which the scammer keeps jerking along, just out of reach, but always in plain sight. As long as the scammer never asks for a large sum, which would create alarm and resistance, the victim can be diddled indefinitely for smaller amounts that will add up to a tidy sum over time. (And I of all people should know this, having read Joe Brown's incomparable novel Addie Pray, on which the film Paper Moon is based, at least a dozen times.)
So - I'm out an afternoon, a tank of gas, the price of a lunch, and some self-respect. And I can afford that, and I can laugh at myself, and I can thank goodness my husband and my friend are the forgiving sort.
But what about all the people I saw on the other side of that glass wall? The people who looked like they had an old car that got them there, and a dream of a nice vacation for their kids, but not much else?
It bothers me considerably that many of them are going to stay on this train to nowhere, and that nobody is looking out for them. It bothers me that it is perfectly legal for bogus companies like this to take advantage of the gullibility of people who don't have a lot of money, but who do have the very human desire to take a nice vacation with their kids at a discounted price. It bothers me that these people are in for months of frustration, disillusionment, and being swindled out of money that they hadn't intended to spend. Oh, yes -eventually, they will get the airline tickets, or the stay in the lodge, or any of a number of other things this company promises. But by the time they do get it, they will have spent, bit by bit, almost the full price of the trip - the very same amount they would have spent if they had simply booked the trip they couldn't afford to take through legitimate channels. Or maybe even more.
And so, Gentle Readers, in the immortal words of Guys and Dolls' Sky Masterson:
On the day when I left home to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. “Son,” my daddy says to me, “I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I’m going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.
The success of this scheme relies on the very sound psychological principles that:
(1) Most people want to get something for nothing. Especially if it's dressed up to look like it's foolproof.
(2) Once these same people have invested something in this "free" item - whether it be money, time, energy, or what have you - they will be extremely reluctant to abandon the quest for the carrot at the end of the stick, which the scammer keeps jerking along, just out of reach, but always in plain sight. As long as the scammer never asks for a large sum, which would create alarm and resistance, the victim can be diddled indefinitely for smaller amounts that will add up to a tidy sum over time. (And I of all people should know this, having read Joe Brown's incomparable novel Addie Pray, on which the film Paper Moon is based, at least a dozen times.)
So - I'm out an afternoon, a tank of gas, the price of a lunch, and some self-respect. And I can afford that, and I can laugh at myself, and I can thank goodness my husband and my friend are the forgiving sort.
But what about all the people I saw on the other side of that glass wall? The people who looked like they had an old car that got them there, and a dream of a nice vacation for their kids, but not much else?
It bothers me considerably that many of them are going to stay on this train to nowhere, and that nobody is looking out for them. It bothers me that it is perfectly legal for bogus companies like this to take advantage of the gullibility of people who don't have a lot of money, but who do have the very human desire to take a nice vacation with their kids at a discounted price. It bothers me that these people are in for months of frustration, disillusionment, and being swindled out of money that they hadn't intended to spend. Oh, yes -eventually, they will get the airline tickets, or the stay in the lodge, or any of a number of other things this company promises. But by the time they do get it, they will have spent, bit by bit, almost the full price of the trip - the very same amount they would have spent if they had simply booked the trip they couldn't afford to take through legitimate channels. Or maybe even more.
And so, Gentle Readers, in the immortal words of Guys and Dolls' Sky Masterson:
On the day when I left home to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. “Son,” my daddy says to me, “I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I’m going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
To the Play
This day my oaths for drinking of wine and going to plays are out, and so I do resolve to take a liberty to-day and then fall to them again. - Samuel Pepys, Diary, Monday, 29 September, 1662
Well, as for drinking of wine - I did not partake - but my two-week theater hiatus ended with a bang last night. A fizzy, delightful sort of a bang...a champagne-cork-in-the-air sort of a bang...a rocket sending out multicolored, starry streamers sort of a bang. In short - I and my theatre-partner-in-crime (who has unmasked himself to all of you as John Wirenius, Department of Collective Bargaining lawyer by day, Anthony Trollope hommage novelist and Theatre Geek by night), hied ourselves down to waaaaaayyy West 42nd St. (Eleventh Avenue - practically in the river) to see the Pearl Theatre Company's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's immortal mistaken-identity comedy The Rivals.
Now, I know this will seem all but unbelievable for a pair of anachronistic wonks like John and myself, but the fact is, neither of us had ever actually read the play, nor seen it performed. All we had to go on when we procured our tickets was that I had seen and relished Sheridan's The School for Scandal at Lincoln Center some years ago, and that we both know who Mrs. Malaprop is, because she has achieved her own sort of brand name recognition status, independent of the play in its entirety, just as one may know that "Soylent Green is made out of people!" without sitting through an entire movie watching Charlton Heston laboriously attempting to alter his facial expression to indicate change of emotion.
Not that I mean to compare Soylent Green with The Rivals, for it would be hard to find two more disparate works. The screenplay of Hollywood's futuristic cult fave may be characterized by many adjectives; witty is not one of them. As for the acting...again, I must give the palm to The Rivals. Last night's performance was graced with a delectable cast, who effortlessly batted their frothy lines back and forth like a supernumary badminton team keeping a be-gemmed aigrette birdie constantly in play - with a few stand-out performances that demand special mention.
Everybody's favorite, Mrs. Malaprop, played by Carol Schultz, did not disappoint, as the actress delivered her loopy lines with great aplomb, denouncing her recalcitrant niece as "an allegory on the banks of the Nile" and deploring those who would cast aspersions on her "nice derangement of epitaphs." (Now that I've said that, I wonder what gloriously daffy misapplications Mrs. M. could have made of such words as recalcitrant and aspersions? I daresay Mrs. Malaprop's physician, detecting signs of oncoming osteoporosis, might have warned her she was in danger of becoming recalcitrant and prescribed a course of Lydia Pinkham's Pills. Cleopatra, that other well-known allegory on the banks of the Nile, undoubtedly perished of aspersions.) Ms. Schultz's giddy simper, as she blushingly confessed to Sir Lucius O'Trigger that he was mistaken in assuming that the billet-doux written by her own fair hand had issued from that of her seventeen-year-old niece, Lydia, but that she, Mrs. Malaprop, was ready to set the matter right, and be his, all his, prodded me into one of those unladylike guffaws that makes my friends do all they can to avoid siting next to me at the theater.
The seventeen-year-old niece, endowed by her creator with the liltingly luscious appellation of Lydia Languish, was not unfittingly portrayed by the enchanting Jessica Love, who was all fire, wit and mischief, as well as being one of the prettiest women I have seen gracing a stage in this many a season. Considerably taller than her stage cousin and foil Julia Melville (an excellent Rachel Botchan), Ms. Love gave the role an intensity that belied the character's surname;the stage fairly crackled with energy whenever she flounced into sight. Ms. Love is also the fortunate possessor of the most expressive pair of eyebrows it has been my good fortune to observe since Marian Seldes last trod the boards.
Ms. Botchan, for her part, gives Julia a touching earnest tenderness as she tries to soothe and comprehend her beloved Falkland, a man who insists on making himself miserable whenever there is the slightest chance that he might actually be happy. Her honest indignation when Falkland finally goes too far in his imbecilic tests of her fidelity, her quiet renunciation of him and all his works, is more powerful in its sorrowful acknowledgment that she cannot give her own happiness into the keeping of a man who insists upon throwing his happiness away than a stormy upbraiding could ever have been.
Sir Lucius O'Trigger, one of the aspirants (there goes that Assassin of the Allegory again!) to the hand of Miss Languish, is written as that stock character, the Comic Irishman. On the page, it is obvious that he could never succeed with the lovely Lydia because, strictly as written, he is a pugnacious rube. On the stage, however, as portrayed by Sean McNall, it becomes quite clear why Mrs. Malaprop is hankering after Sir Lucius, for Mr. McNall invests him with a raffish charm and a splendid physical vigor and grace that had me sitting up a little straighter, running a pointed tongue across my lips, and muttering to my companion, "Don't you think he's rather...feline? I could see him playing Puss-in-Boots. Like, Antonio Banderas Puss-in-Boots." Dear John gravely inclined his head and conceded the point. At this stage, just as the discussion was getting interesting, an ill-bred theatergoer behind up poked us with her toe and hissed, "Do you mind?"
But the jewel in the crown was Dan Daily in the role of Sir Anthony Absolute, father of Jack Absolute, Miss Lydia's preferred suitor (although she doesn't know it, since she is under the impression she is about to hoodwink all her friends and elope with Ensign Beverly... which is what Jack has been calling himself, knowing that the romantic Miss Languish suffers from a whopping case of reverse snobbery and wouldn't have him if she knew he had money and a title.)
Sir Anthony, growing redder and redder in the face as he thunders out his dictum that Jack shall marry at his behest, even if the proposed bride "shall be as ugly as I choose : she shall have a hump on each shoulder; she shall be as crooked as the crescent ; her one eye shall roll like the bull's in Cox's Museum; she shall have a skin like a mummy, and the beard of a goat; she shall be all this, sirrah ! yet I will make you ogle her all day, and sit up all night to write sonnets on her beauty!"
Sir Anthony, apoplectic at being defied, thundering at his offspring, "You know I am compliance itself when I am not thwarted ; no one more easily led when I have my own way; but don't put me in a frenzy!"
Or - perhaps my favorite moment - Sir Anthony, confessing at last, upon Jack's tendering unexpected obedience to the wishes of his sire, that the lady he has in mind as a daughter-in-law is not, after all, a creature out of Cox's Museum, but rather a delectable Miss of seventeen -
"Nay, but Jack, such eyes ! such eyes ! so innocently wild ! so bashfully irresolute ! not a glance but speaks and kindles some thought of love ! Then, Jack, her cheeks ! her cheeks, Jack ! so deeply blushing at the insinuations of her tell-tale eyes ! Then, Jack, her lips ! O Jack, lips smiling at their own discretion ; and if not smiling, more sweetly pouting ; more lovely in sullenness!"
Who else could this be, but the mistress of Jack's heart - Lydia Languish, herself? Jack, of course, is fully aware of this already - hence, his capitulation. But Papa Absolute doesn't know that he knows, and Mr. Daily's rhapsodies as he suits his actions to his words... the pretty pursing of his lips as he emulates Lydia's pouts... the twiddling of a forefinger in the air as he admonishes his offspring that the connubial delights awaiting him are too good for him by half, and if he can't appreciate them, perhaps they'd be better enjoyed by Absolute père, are indescribable in their comic perfection.
As John and I agreed, after the curtain calls were done, and we had leapt to our feet as a two-person standing ovation (the rest of the audience was shy about giving excellence its due, but we were not),
"Now, that was acting!"
Well, as for drinking of wine - I did not partake - but my two-week theater hiatus ended with a bang last night. A fizzy, delightful sort of a bang...a champagne-cork-in-the-air sort of a bang...a rocket sending out multicolored, starry streamers sort of a bang. In short - I and my theatre-partner-in-crime (who has unmasked himself to all of you as John Wirenius, Department of Collective Bargaining lawyer by day, Anthony Trollope hommage novelist and Theatre Geek by night), hied ourselves down to waaaaaayyy West 42nd St. (Eleventh Avenue - practically in the river) to see the Pearl Theatre Company's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's immortal mistaken-identity comedy The Rivals.
Now, I know this will seem all but unbelievable for a pair of anachronistic wonks like John and myself, but the fact is, neither of us had ever actually read the play, nor seen it performed. All we had to go on when we procured our tickets was that I had seen and relished Sheridan's The School for Scandal at Lincoln Center some years ago, and that we both know who Mrs. Malaprop is, because she has achieved her own sort of brand name recognition status, independent of the play in its entirety, just as one may know that "Soylent Green is made out of people!" without sitting through an entire movie watching Charlton Heston laboriously attempting to alter his facial expression to indicate change of emotion.
Not that I mean to compare Soylent Green with The Rivals, for it would be hard to find two more disparate works. The screenplay of Hollywood's futuristic cult fave may be characterized by many adjectives; witty is not one of them. As for the acting...again, I must give the palm to The Rivals. Last night's performance was graced with a delectable cast, who effortlessly batted their frothy lines back and forth like a supernumary badminton team keeping a be-gemmed aigrette birdie constantly in play - with a few stand-out performances that demand special mention.
Everybody's favorite, Mrs. Malaprop, played by Carol Schultz, did not disappoint, as the actress delivered her loopy lines with great aplomb, denouncing her recalcitrant niece as "an allegory on the banks of the Nile" and deploring those who would cast aspersions on her "nice derangement of epitaphs." (Now that I've said that, I wonder what gloriously daffy misapplications Mrs. M. could have made of such words as recalcitrant and aspersions? I daresay Mrs. Malaprop's physician, detecting signs of oncoming osteoporosis, might have warned her she was in danger of becoming recalcitrant and prescribed a course of Lydia Pinkham's Pills. Cleopatra, that other well-known allegory on the banks of the Nile, undoubtedly perished of aspersions.) Ms. Schultz's giddy simper, as she blushingly confessed to Sir Lucius O'Trigger that he was mistaken in assuming that the billet-doux written by her own fair hand had issued from that of her seventeen-year-old niece, Lydia, but that she, Mrs. Malaprop, was ready to set the matter right, and be his, all his, prodded me into one of those unladylike guffaws that makes my friends do all they can to avoid siting next to me at the theater.
The seventeen-year-old niece, endowed by her creator with the liltingly luscious appellation of Lydia Languish, was not unfittingly portrayed by the enchanting Jessica Love, who was all fire, wit and mischief, as well as being one of the prettiest women I have seen gracing a stage in this many a season. Considerably taller than her stage cousin and foil Julia Melville (an excellent Rachel Botchan), Ms. Love gave the role an intensity that belied the character's surname;the stage fairly crackled with energy whenever she flounced into sight. Ms. Love is also the fortunate possessor of the most expressive pair of eyebrows it has been my good fortune to observe since Marian Seldes last trod the boards.
Ms. Botchan, for her part, gives Julia a touching earnest tenderness as she tries to soothe and comprehend her beloved Falkland, a man who insists on making himself miserable whenever there is the slightest chance that he might actually be happy. Her honest indignation when Falkland finally goes too far in his imbecilic tests of her fidelity, her quiet renunciation of him and all his works, is more powerful in its sorrowful acknowledgment that she cannot give her own happiness into the keeping of a man who insists upon throwing his happiness away than a stormy upbraiding could ever have been.
Sir Lucius O'Trigger, one of the aspirants (there goes that Assassin of the Allegory again!) to the hand of Miss Languish, is written as that stock character, the Comic Irishman. On the page, it is obvious that he could never succeed with the lovely Lydia because, strictly as written, he is a pugnacious rube. On the stage, however, as portrayed by Sean McNall, it becomes quite clear why Mrs. Malaprop is hankering after Sir Lucius, for Mr. McNall invests him with a raffish charm and a splendid physical vigor and grace that had me sitting up a little straighter, running a pointed tongue across my lips, and muttering to my companion, "Don't you think he's rather...feline? I could see him playing Puss-in-Boots. Like, Antonio Banderas Puss-in-Boots." Dear John gravely inclined his head and conceded the point. At this stage, just as the discussion was getting interesting, an ill-bred theatergoer behind up poked us with her toe and hissed, "Do you mind?"
But the jewel in the crown was Dan Daily in the role of Sir Anthony Absolute, father of Jack Absolute, Miss Lydia's preferred suitor (although she doesn't know it, since she is under the impression she is about to hoodwink all her friends and elope with Ensign Beverly... which is what Jack has been calling himself, knowing that the romantic Miss Languish suffers from a whopping case of reverse snobbery and wouldn't have him if she knew he had money and a title.)
Sir Anthony, growing redder and redder in the face as he thunders out his dictum that Jack shall marry at his behest, even if the proposed bride "shall be as ugly as I choose : she shall have a hump on each shoulder; she shall be as crooked as the crescent ; her one eye shall roll like the bull's in Cox's Museum; she shall have a skin like a mummy, and the beard of a goat; she shall be all this, sirrah ! yet I will make you ogle her all day, and sit up all night to write sonnets on her beauty!"
Sir Anthony, apoplectic at being defied, thundering at his offspring, "You know I am compliance itself when I am not thwarted ; no one more easily led when I have my own way; but don't put me in a frenzy!"
Or - perhaps my favorite moment - Sir Anthony, confessing at last, upon Jack's tendering unexpected obedience to the wishes of his sire, that the lady he has in mind as a daughter-in-law is not, after all, a creature out of Cox's Museum, but rather a delectable Miss of seventeen -
"Nay, but Jack, such eyes ! such eyes ! so innocently wild ! so bashfully irresolute ! not a glance but speaks and kindles some thought of love ! Then, Jack, her cheeks ! her cheeks, Jack ! so deeply blushing at the insinuations of her tell-tale eyes ! Then, Jack, her lips ! O Jack, lips smiling at their own discretion ; and if not smiling, more sweetly pouting ; more lovely in sullenness!"
Who else could this be, but the mistress of Jack's heart - Lydia Languish, herself? Jack, of course, is fully aware of this already - hence, his capitulation. But Papa Absolute doesn't know that he knows, and Mr. Daily's rhapsodies as he suits his actions to his words... the pretty pursing of his lips as he emulates Lydia's pouts... the twiddling of a forefinger in the air as he admonishes his offspring that the connubial delights awaiting him are too good for him by half, and if he can't appreciate them, perhaps they'd be better enjoyed by Absolute père, are indescribable in their comic perfection.
As John and I agreed, after the curtain calls were done, and we had leapt to our feet as a two-person standing ovation (the rest of the audience was shy about giving excellence its due, but we were not),
"Now, that was acting!"
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