Girl Detective

#23 in my 2007 book challenge was Hetty Dorval, a gift from a kind friend who visited Persephone Books on her recent trip to London. Like all Persephone editions, it is a beautiful book with a dove-grey paper cover, with end pages and matching bookmark in a complementary textile pattern.

It is a slim but powerful novella of a young girl who develops a friendship with Mrs. Dorval, a woman who has a questionable past. The girl’s fascination is easy to empathize with. Her development into adulthood, and her increased understanding of human nature and behavior, contribute to a fascinating example of the coming-of-age novel. Mrs. Dorval’s sexuality is offered as proof of her bad nature; this troubled me. But the rest of her character so thoroughly completed a portrait of a self-involved, self-serving individual that it made sense in the context of the story.

#22 in my 2007 book challenge was Jim Crace’s Being Dead. The book opens with a couple that has just been murdered, and floats back and forth in time to detail what happened before, how they met, and what happens to their bodies afterward. Crace’s command of narrative is impressive. He switches time and perspective, yet the book is seamless. It is an involving story of the couple’s relationship, as well as an often gruesome, but still compelling, description of the biology and zoology of death.

#21 in my 2007 book challenge is Kris Holloway’s Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali. I know the author, since we attended high school together, but I would admire this book in any case. Holloway details her two years in the Peace Corps in Africa working with a local midwife, Monique. Holloway shows how important and influential Monique was to her village, and to Holloway, whose prior training had been in agriculture, not health. The book is extremely well researched. The bibliography has recent and classic works on international women’s health, birthing traditions, and the ethics of ethnography. Holloway respectfully avoids both criticism and romanticization of the Africans, though she makes clear at the end which cultural differences she’ll miss and which she won’t. The influence of each woman on the other, and the different insights and information they share, make this a moving and detailed portrait of two women’s friendship that crossed cultures. Additionally, it’s a fascinating portrait of birth and childcare practices in another culture.

This book is not easily categorized, but it’s garnered a great deal of attention in spite of that. It was the first nonfiction book chosen by the Literary Ventures Fund, a nonprofit foundation that presented at BEA earlier this year. It has already been included in several college reading lists. I highly recommend this book. It provides a refreshingly different perspective on friendship, birth, men’s and women’s relationships, family and community relationships, and more.

#51 in my 2007 movie challenge is Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu, an aptly great film for hitting the big five-oh so early in the year. I saw the newly restored 35mm print, which will be shown later this summer in Vancouver, Ft. Worth and more. If you have the opportunity to go see this film’s restored print, do so. How good is the print? I could see exactly how frizzy the wife’s perm was, the shadow of a mustache above the mistress’s lip, and where the husband’s eyebrows had been redrawn.

In addition to the high quality of the print, it’s a great film. Like Citizen Kane, with which it’s often compared, it’s amazing both for the story and its technical proficiency. Like Renoir’s earlier Grand Illusion, it has a startling prescience for the coming war. Altman was a fan, and its influence is apparent in the ensemble casts of all his films, but most obviously in the upstairs/downstairs manor house of Gosford Park.

#50 in my movie challenge for the year was a re-watching of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. I agree with the final comment from the Terri Sutton City Pages review when it came out:

Your cake is so stale it makes me sick–but oh, the frosting…

Yes, the center story is a boring and predictable love story about a hooker with a heart of gold, a penniless poet, and a lecherous rich duke. But the Bollywood-esque excess, McGregor’s charm, Kidman’s occasional and surprising comedic turns, and Luhrmann’s famous musical madness, make for a movie that so enthralls me that I watched to the end on this multiple viewing, even though I was exhausted, and kept vowing to go to bed after the VERY NEXT SCENE.

I also admit, guiltily, to singing along.

#49 in my 2007 movie challenge was The Illusionist. Like The Prestige, it is about magic shows in the 19th century, was well reviewed, and stars a famous actor (Edward Norton, Jr.), a hot young thing (Jessica Biel), and an older, skilled character actor (Paul Giamatti). My friend B wondered if she liked this movie less than The Prestige because she was in labor when she watched it. B, I don’t think it was the labor; I found The Illusionist boring, predictable, and overlong. I nearly stopped watching towards the end, and I didn’t care about any of the characters. The Prestige made me think. The Illusionist made me annoyed.

My husband G. Grod thinks that Jessica Biel’s lips are natural. Awful Plastic Surgery and I think otherwise.

#48 in my 2007 movie challenge was George Cukor’s Gaslight, a costlier remake of the 1940 UK film that was released in the US as Angel Street. MGM tried, unsuccessfully, to have all prints of the earlier film destroyed. It is included as an extra on the 2004 DVD. Ingrid Bergman is the niece of a famous singer who is murdered. Years later, a singer herself, she marries her pianist, played creepily by Charles Boyer. Cukor shows the audience Boyer is up to no good, though Bergman is kept in the dark, both by the story, and by Boyer, who is slowly trying to drive her mad. Joseph Cotten is the good guy policeman who decides to meddle, much like the policeman in Laura, then solves the mystery. A young Angela Lansbury stands out in her first role, as a saucy, sulky housemaid.

#47 in my 2007 movie challenge was Laura, which had been lounging on my Tivo drive for some time. Based on the novel by Vera Caspary, it’s another classic noir. Story doesn’t matter so much as character and atmosphere, and the latter is exemplified by the famous theme song. On the surface, it’s about a detective who becomes obsessed with a dead woman’s portrait; he feels compelled to solve her murder. Less obviously but more interestingly, it’s about women and power, both in business and in personal relationships. Vincent Price is unsettling as the handsome, well-mannered man who Laura was engaged to marry, but Clifton Webb steals the show as the pretentious man who “made” Laura.

From Laura Barton’s “Girl Wonders” in The Guardian:

If there is a single thread that links these fictional girl heroes, it is surely that they were all people who knew, very clearly, their own state of mind, who were brave and strong and articulate

The article leads off with images of two of my favorite titian-haired heroines, Anne (with an ‘e’) and Nancy. As a girl, I aspired to be a tomboy, like George in Edid Blyton’s Five mysteries, but I knew I didn’t have it in me–I didn’t like bugs, dirt or mess. My favorite was Trixie Belden. She had unruly hair and said dumb things, but still solved the mystery. Nancy Drew was great, but always very tidy. Trixie walked a middle ground between George and Nancy that I could relate to.

#46 in my 2007 movie challenge was Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. He co-starred with then-wife Rita Hayworth to raise money for the project he really wanted to be working on, a stage production of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Welles is an Irish bad boy with a shady past who falls literally in the path of Hayworth’s femme fatale, married to a rich, cruel, older, disabled man. With a bleached, short hairstyle that ages and homogenizes her striking looks, Hayworth is appropriately chilly as the removed object of Welle’s unwilling passion and sympathy. Like many noir works, the plot is not the thing, while the atmosphere is, and this film has lots of it. There is a claustrophobic boat cruise followed by twists and turns of loyalties and the truth. The end features a striking scene in a house of mirrors that may have been the first of its kind.

There is a curious lack of chemistry between Welles and Hayworth, which made sense when I learned they were soon to be divorced. Hayworth is not portrayed in a flattering light, either in appearance or character. In the end, Welles’s bitter, young loner finds that beauty and money aren’t meant to be his, and he is lucky to escape with his life and hard-earned experience. I can’t help but suspect that Welles was drawing from his own life in making this movie.

There is a remake in pre-production, slated to be directed by Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express) and rumored to star Nicole Kidman.

When I lived by myself after college, I had few belongings, and I cleaned my apartment weekly. It was usually both tidy and clean.

After I married, I cleaned bi-weekly, and usually kept things tidy.

After I had my first child, and after the first sleep-deprived, bewildering months, I cleaned about once a month, and had trouble keeping things tidy in our small apartment. The influx of baby clothes and toys made things more difficult. Our place was mostly clean, but cluttered.

After I got pregnant with a second child, things really went south. Cleaning fell to the bottom of the priority list. We’d moved into a two-story house with a finished basement. While we didn’t have a lot of square feet, it was still double what we’d had before. We had more clothes, and more toys. We’d accumulated more things, since we had more space to put it in. Our house was neither clean nor tidy.

After I was diagnosed with post-partum depression, my sister Sydney kindly offered to help by paying for a cleaning service. I gratefully accepted, though I was stricken with guilt. Shouldn’t I clean my own house? But since I was struggling inwardly with my emotions and outwardly with parenting, I decided to accept whatever help was offered, and try NOT to feel guilty about it.

Then, as my depression lessened with treatment, my guilt crept back. Shouldn’t I be able to clean my own house? Especially since I now would have a few days to myself with the boys at daycare? I decided to have someone in once more, and see how it went.

It went beautifully. She cleaned while I organized. I got around to projects I’d put off for years. I realized why I’m so bad at cleaning my own house: I can’t just clean. I stop to put things away, or I do laundry AND clean, or I slow down when I have to figure out what to do with something. The benefit of having someone else clean was I could set the priorities (bathrooms, then kitchen floor, then dusting, then vacuuming) and she did them efficiently in that order. She had no connection to what was in her way. I could spend time on the things that usually interrupt my attempts to clean while she cleaned. It was a good combination.

I still feel unreasonably guilty that I am not able to cook, clean, read, write, and care for the boys even if just part time. But seeing that it’s a tandem working relationship, with me organizing while someone else cleans, feels like a much better, and healthier, interpretation.

Thanks, SFP! (at Pages Turned)

Here are a few female friends who I think rock

Becca

Rock Hack rocks both literally and figuratively

Sars at Tomato Nation

Lisa at The Rage Diaries

Dawn at Avenging Sybil

Camille at Book Moot

Link thanks to SFP at Pages Turned:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* hell (3x)
* sex (2x)
* ass (1x)

More discouraging recall new for parents. Veggie Booty, a staple snack in our family that Guppy particularly loves, has been linked to cases of Salmonella. Throw out any bags of Veggie Booty in your house, and keep an eye on your little ones for symptoms.

We have no Booty in the house right now, and though 16mo Guppy has eaten it regularly for many months now, he hasn’t gotten sick.

For the past several years, and the past three domiciles, I’ve wanted to get organized, and catch up on all the magazines, and bibs and bobs of paper and photos that have accumulated over the last decade (ulp!) or so. Two moves and two children made getting my act together all the more difficult. I’ve got boxes full of drifting and shifting piles.

I am beginning to suspect that if I am ever to make a dent in the backlog, I’ll just have to throw all the old stuff out without looking at it or reading it, and then more fiercely police what comes into the house. Already I’ve reduced our magazine subscriptions to four, I recycle whatever we can, I donate frequently, and I take superfluous books to Half Price Books. On bad days, it feels as if I’m barely making a dent, which is further reason for me to consider a virtual fire of all the old stuff, and start anew.

During my recent Arizona vacation, I had the opportunity to ride a cute pink bike that belonged to my friend Becca . I bought a cute pink helmet and I got on a bike for the first time in over fifteen years.

I enjoyed it so much I visited Behind Bars Bicycle Shop with my husband when I got back to Minnesota, and I got a cute bike of my own. G. Grod has been giving Behind Bars much of our disposable income since last year when he bought a bike and began commuting the 13 miles each way to work a few times a week, though not during winter (Nov. to Apr., approximately).

Our family now has four regular vehicles: a Nissan Maxima, a Mountain Buggy Urban Double stroller, G’s bike (a Redline 925) and my new bike, a yellow Sun Retro Aluminum Cruiser. Our one-car life is working out even better now that I have wheels of my own.

Sars at Tomato Nation writes about the perfect orange/vanilla ratio. Like Sars, I’m a longtime fan of all things Creamsicle-y.

From Wikipedia:

Creamsicle is a brand name, also owned by Unilever, for a frozen dessert which resembles an ice pop, with a center composed of vanilla ice cream, and an exterior layer of flavored ice frozen around a wooden or plastic stick. Popular flavors for Creamsicles include orange and raspberry.

American National Creamsicle Day is celebrated on 14 August annually.

I loved the Hostess orange cupcakes far more than their chocolate counterparts. Homemade orange cupcakes with cream cheese frosting are a healthier version of them. I recently made a float of Sonny’s blood orange sorbet in a glass of Natural Brew Vanilla Creme Ale. The orange scones at Au Bon Pain and Barnes and Noble have helped me when I’m craving that orange/vanilla combo. I haven’t gone as far as Sars did to pursue orange/vanilla perfection, but I can empathize with the worthiness of her quest. I am now off to make a Creamsicle Smoothie, recipe from Cooks Country, 8/2005.

Creamsicle Smoothie

Makes 5 1/2 cups
1 (12-ounce) can frozen orange juice concentrate
2 small bananas , roughly chopped (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 cups vanilla yogurt
1/2 cup orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix all ingredients in blender until smooth.

I recently took a three-week vacation. My sons Drake and Guppy stayed with G. Grod’s kind, brave parents. I went to an Arizona spa for a week, spent a weekend with a friend and her sister, then the remainder of the week on my own in their AZ condo, and returned to MN for a week with G., sans kids. It was part of my recovery process from the depression I became mired in after Guppy was born, sixteen months ago.

Both during and after this vacation, I felt more balanced, happy, and possessed of clear insight than I have ever in my life. This vacation was life changing.

Three Things:

1. I was burned out after three years as a full-time caregiver, first for Drake, and later with Guppy.

2. I became burned out as a full-time caregiver because I am

a. Introverted: small children have many needs, which don’t allow for much down time.
b. Irritible: small children scream, fight, and defecate frequently. It may be normal, but I still find it irritating.
c. Intellectual: caring full-time for small children leaves little time for my own intellectual pursuits, though my book and movie challenges remind me to keep trying.

3. Finding balance involves no longer being the full-time caregiver for my kids. We are trying a nearby 3-day-a-week home daycare that is off to a promising start. This will allow me quiet time to pursue work in writing and teaching. It also enables me to better enjoy the time I do have with my family.

Since I’ve been back we’ve played more, laughed more, and hugged more. There has been far less frustration and yelling on everyone’s part. The time away, which some might view as selfish and overlong, has had an enormous positive impact on all of us.

The Wall Street Journal details the new industry around baby names, and credits some of the rising demand to the internet. (Link from Arts & Letters Daily.) I don’t think it’s out of line for parents to care deeply about choosing a good name for their child(ren). Names are important, and they’re difficult and costly to change.

When we were expecting our first child, my husband G. Grod and I never bought a baby name book, but we did search the internet for ideas. I had one hard, fast rule: no names after living relatives–too confusing, and prone to hurt feelings. I had a strong preference to use names to connect to family heritage. G. Grod wanted names with hard consonants, since he has none in his surname. He also wanted to consider the name of the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback, Donovan. We made a list, and told anyone who asked what was on it, even though we were pretty sure what the name was going to be. We got lots of feedback, but it didn’t change our decision one jot.

We waited until Drake was born to confirm his name. His first and second names are family names of both G. Grod and me, his third name is my last name, as I didn’t take G’s when we married, and his fourth name is G’s surname. (No hyphens.)

We did things a bit differently when we were expecting our second child. As before, we chose to find out the sex (FYI, gender is NOT the same as sex) at the 20wk ultrasound. They didn’t have to look hard; both boys were exhibitionists. I had hoped for a girl, if only because I really liked the name I’d picked: Judith (after my father’s late sister, who died young of breast cancer) and Mariah (the middle name of my maternal great-grandmother, a strong willed woman who outlived three husbands.)

Once we knew it was a boy, we picked possible names, but didn’t share them, since I didn’t want to know what others thought. We first picked names we liked, then checked to see if they were on family trees; they were. Guppy’s first name is one that a few people I knew had chosen as a middle name. It was also the name of one of my maternal grandfather’s brothers. His second name is the pseudonym of an author G. and I both admire, whose real name is shared by both my sister and a dear friend. It was also a name from G.’s stepfather’s family tree. Again, his third name is my surname, and his fourth is G’s surname.

I like the names we picked. The names work well in full, or shortened. Interestingly, Drake often tells us his name is Donovan, so perhaps we made the wrong choice after all.

Like Lauren at television blog Everybody Loves Saturday Night, I’m very much missing Bravo’s Project Runway, but Top Chef is ably filling my guilty pleasure of reality television. Like PR, TC has a room full of artists who are given escalatingly inventive challenges each week. They face time and budget constraints. In the end their creations are judged by a panel that includes chef Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi (married to Salman Rushdie, and who flaunts a long scar on her right arm that she got from an auto accident), Gail Simmons of Food & Wine magazine, and a guest judge, most often Ted Allen, formerly of Queer Eye. The TC judges panel is nowhere near as snarky as that of PR, but there’s still lots of criticism that might not be entirely constructive.

The first two shows’ eliminations weren’t suprising. Both Clay and Sandee were much less experienced than other chefs in the competition. While Tre seems to be an early favorite (not unlike Michael Knight of PR3), I think Hung might be the chef to beat.

What engages me about both shows is how creativity and performance can either bloom or wilt under pressure. I couldn’t do what they do, but I enjoy watching what they do.