Girl Detective

As part of my post-Tree of Smoke reading on Vietnam, Dispatches was recommended by trusted pen pals Kate and Duff. Herr was a writer for Esquire in his mid-20s when he went to cover the Vietnam war in the late 1960’s. He spent most of his time with marine soldiers on the ground, or “grunts” and his respect and affection for them is palpable. The feeling was mostly, but not always, mutual:

…another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way.

Herr’s prose is poetic, and often trippy, reflecting both the insanity of the war, and the drugs many took to help get through it. He often uses second-person address to draw the reader in:

It seemed the least of the war’s contradictions that to lose your worst sense of American shame you had to leave the Dial Soapers in Saigon and a hundred headquarters who spoke goodworks and killed nobody themselves, and go out to the grungy men in the jungle who talked bloody murder and killed people all the time.

It’s an interesting counterpart to Tim O’Brien’s Things They Carried. Herr was older and had a different vantage point, and Dispatches is labeled military history, not fiction. There are also some significant differences in the Army and Marine soldiers, according each to their author. The books are different, but the same. They’re often tragic and wrenching, but redeemed, perhaps, by the telling of other’s stories to show the brute stupidity of war. They are still frighteningly relevant today, and probably timeless.

2yo Guppy woke screaming the other day at 4am, angrily yelling, “But _I_ wanted to take off my sandals, Mama! Not YOU!” I gave him some water and a pat, and we went back to sleep.

Next day, 4am. This time, Guppy hollering, “I wanted my milk, but YOU poured it out, Mama!” Water, pat, sleep.

This morning he woke at 5:45am, but not screaming. I told him it wasn’t time to get up. Water, pat, sleep.

I fear for our future relationship, if Guppy is going to clutch each day’s little injustices till they induce nightmares.

I feel as if I’m caught in a reading zeitgeist, with many online articles touching on similar themes.

At The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz details what he sees as “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“:

[I]t makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you …[and] inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

An education from an elite US university, like Yale, will reinforce the class system, and prepare students for the security of an upper-class job, not introspection and independent thought.

In “The New Learning That Failed” at The Criterion (link from Arts & Letters Daily), Victor David Hanson argues that modern universities have lost two important lessons from a classic, Western education: the value of self-criticism and introspection, and theories of exploitation based in the real world. The result, according to Hanson, is pedagogy focused on what to think, not how to think.

Hanson also notes the loss of three things that used to distinguish between what once was studied in a traditional liberal arts education, and pop culture:

an appreciation that a few seminal works of art and literature had weathered fad and cant and, by general agreement, due to their aesthetics or insight, or both, spoke universally to the human condition.

[an] old assumption that professors, through long training, were necessary to guide students through such classic texts [like] Dante’s Inferno

an appreciation of a manner of formal thought and beauty that separated some high art and literature from more popular and accessible counterparts.

Historian David McCullough echoed this idea of established classics in a recent commencement speech, “The Love of Learning” (link from Mental Multivitamin):

Read for pleasure, to be sure… But take seriously–read closely–books that have stood the test of time. Study a masterpiece, take it apart, study its architecture, its vocabulary, its intent. Underline, make notes in the margins, and after a few years, go back and read it again.

At The Times, Rod Liddle writes about books that don’t survive their age (link from Bookslut):

[T]hey seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply evaporates.

Liddle’s, though a rant, is similar in subject to Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post on Cannery Row and other Steinbeck works (link from Arts & Letters Daily):

Not many books of our youth survive unscathed into what passes for our maturity, and many other books await that maturity before we are ready to appreciate and understand them.

For more on Steinbeck’s books as classics, see “The Rescuing of Steinbeck” at The New York Review of Books. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)

All of the preceding articles provide an interesting context for Entertainment Weekly’s lists of new classics–the top 100 since 1983 in books, movies, tv, music, and more. In the blogosphere, at least, EW’s lists seems to have quickly eclipsed the AFI’s 10 top 10, released the same week. As with any list, there’s a great deal of righteous protest: This should have been higher, that lower, this one’s missing, I can’t believe that one is on there.

EW qualifies their lists up front. They’re not only based on quality, but on influence. They include recent works, because that’s what EW does–it’s a weekly magazine for entertainment, focusing on what’s new.

A few things struck me about the lists, and the commentary on it. First, I think there’s great value in a waiting period to see if a work endures. Second, lists are only ever a starting point for discussion. Nearly every list that’s published acknowledges this, but that gets lost in the ensuing outrage. Third, I think there was a great deal of justice done in the lists for works that were critically acclaimed but not blockbusters, or for things like comics that still aren’t considered by many to be real books. Finally, my own numbers told an interesting story: 37 books, 87 movies, 67 television shows, and 46 albums. I don’t agree with all of EW’s choices, and I think they put too much emphasis on recent works, but it affirmed why I am a fan of the magazine–I like much of what the writers like, so EW is a good index of things I might like.

Minnesota is home to many famous writers, many of whom aren’t even on that list, like Kate DiCamillo, Faith Sullivan, and Alison McGhee. Minnesota is also home to many great comics writers and illustrators, as this article at MinnPost notes.

I figure it’s the tough winter that makes a happy home for artists.

I like Johnny Depp. I’ve liked Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. So I thought I would like Sweeney Todd. I thought the quality of the production and acting (Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen and Alan Rickman) would outweigh the dark and gory aspects of the film.

I was wrong.

The film is so dark, and so relentlessly gory, that I spent much of it gazing at the ceiling, waiting for scenes to be done. It’s embarrassing to admit I didn’t like the film because it was too dark and gory. What did I expect? Perhaps a little more humanity, a lot less blood and violence. But the acting, the look of the film, and the singing were all top notch. And it was interesting to see the pregnant Bonham Carter’s bust and belly change size, sometimes even within a scene, depending on when the scenes were filmed.

Remember a few weeks ago when I celebrated a mother’s trifecta? Well, yesterday’s good fortune went on from there. Uninterrupted night’s sleep; hot coffee and pastry for breakfast; time to read in peace; kids playing independently so I could practice yoga; a double espresso (our machine’s still in the shop. Sigh) on the way to the park/pool; kids left pool without a fight; nap, reading and writing time; grilled Caesar, Duck confit and grilled duck on a date with my husband at St. Paul’s new Strip Club; browsing at the bookstore without buying; excellent chocolate desserts from Nick and Eddie’s excellent pastry chef. It was lovely.

Then last night was interrupted by 2yo Guppy crying for water in the wee small hours, and he was awake before 6am demanding love, attention and books. And today’s trip to the pool involved fights on either end. So life is more like usual. But yesterday was really great.

I’ve begun to reread Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels, prompted by my recent viewing and reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare is but one of many sources the author draws on in this sprawling tale of Morpheus, the King of Dreams. Milton, mythology, and magic are a few of the others. The series of 76 total issues has been collected in ten graphic novels.

Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.

You say that dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar–ask yourselves, all of you–what power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?

The first volume plants the seeds for both the mood of the series, and many of its later stories. Morpheus is captured and imprisoned for decades. Once released, he seeks revenge and to regain his power. It’s sometimes hard going, but the whole is well worth the reading. Don’t stop before issue #8; you’ll miss something wonderful.

Sandman: The Doll’s House. From the introduction by Clive Barker:

There is a wonderful, willful quality to this mix: Mr. Gaiman is one of those adventurous creators who sees no reason why his tales shouldn’t embrace slapstick comedy, mysterical musings, and the grimmest collection of serial kills this side of Death Row.

The tales diverge, and Rose Walker, an American teenager with a peculiar provenance, becomes the heart of the story, with Morpheus appearing on the fringes.

Sandman: Dream Country. Of four standalone short stories, my favorite is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, based on and around Shakespeare’s play, and beautifully illustrated by Charles Vess. It was the first, and last, comic book to win a World Fantasy Award. (They changed the rules for the award so it would not happen again.)

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

It’s 4yo Drake, growing up. He has a handful of bedtime friends from when he was an infant: Mouton, a sheep blankie; Daisy and Duckie, stuffed ducks; Googly Fish; and Snake, from Ikea. When he was three, during what I thought of as his age of imagination, he would fashion a car out of the snake, put the other animals inside, then say he was going in the friends’ car to the friends’ house to play.

In a recent swirl of tidying, I picked Mouton off the floor, held her up and said, “Drake, Mouton belongs in bed, not on the floor. The floor hurts her back.”

“Mom,” he said gravely. “Mouton is a _stuffed animal_. She doesn’t have feelings.”

I paused as the emotional wind got knocked out of me, then tried again.

“Even if she’s a pretend sheep, then she has pretend feelings, right?”

“OK,” Drake replied, then grabbed the sheep and tossed her on the bed.

It’s funny and sad to see a stage about to end. It always feels like certain things will go on forever, until they don’t. Interestingly, 2yo Guppy is getting picky about his loveys just as Drake has become less interested in his. Today Guppy had a brachiosaurus jump on my head while I did yoga, insisted on Snuffles the bear and Binky the triceratops in his crib for naptime, and let the pigeon pick out books to read.

May and June mark several personal anniversaries:

10 years ago: I moved to Minnesota and met friends Big Brain and Blogenheimer, and the future Mrs. Blogeheimer.
8 years ago, I began practicing yoga. Still can’t do a headstand or crow pose–8 years of humility.
6 years ago I started blogging, after my friend M. Giant told me about his blog, Velcrometer.
4 years ago, I resigned from my job to stay home with my son Drake, who’ll be 5yo in August.

All good things.

I sought out Karen Hesse’s Newbery Award winning Out of the Dust after reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Both are tragic stories about families from Oklahoma’s dust bowl during the Great Depression; that’s about where the similarities end. Out of the Dust is a short, spare novel in free verse, narrated by 14yo Billie Jo Kelby. More details might spoil the reading experience for others. Sad but redemptive, it’s a beautifully written historical novel.

Last weekend, my husband, G. Grod, and I went to the Guthrie Theater to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I wore a dress, heels, lipstick AND mascara. It was truly an event.

Joe Dowling directed, so we knew to expect a crowd-pleasing, rather than an intellectual, take on the material. The fairy costumes were appropriately ostentatious, but looked like leftover Cats costumes. The play had other similarly dated cultural references, not surprising given it’s a revival of a production Dowling did over a decade ago.

I find the Guthrie succeeds best on a small scale, rather than when it tries to emulate New York City. The fairy productions felt weighted down with effects and gimmicks, as well as by pedestrian musical numbers. But the smaller scenes, especially those of the players, were successful. The final scene featuring their play within a play went long, but was one of the funniest parts of the production.

I followed the play by reading the text. I savor the familiar lines, like Puck’s “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” and Lysander’s “The course of true love never did run smooth.” It is not a play in which it’s good to be a woman. Hippolyta does not seem nearly as eager as Theseus to wed, perhaps because he “won [her] love, doing [her] injuries.” Hermia must choose among death, marriage to a man she doesn’t love, or a nunnery. Helena is spurned by her former lover, who wishes to marry the unwilling Hermia. And Titania is bewitched by Puck and her husband Oberon into loving the foolish mortal Bottom, whom Puck has disguised as an ass. While the ending is replete with the weddings required for this to be a comedy, I didn’t enjoy this earlier play of Shakespeare’s as much as I do the later romances.

On a whim, I unearthed my Hellboy graphic novels: Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, The Chained Coffin, and Conqueror Worm. I was surprised to find that one of them, Conqueror Worm, I’d never actually read. They were all a lot of fun. Hellboy is a demon with a mysterious past who grew up to be the “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator.” He tracks down monsters, demons and their ilk. Creator Mike Mignola has a distinctive art style, oft imitated and perfectly suited to his pulp-y monster comics. The cast of characters is fascinating and keeps growing with the stories. Hellboy is for fans of old-time monster movies like Bride of Frankenstein, and newer works that are scary, sharp and funny.

As our family has muddled through SIX WEEKS of viruses, I’ve turned to the parenting tool of PBS kids tv many times. We’ve found several shows that the boys like and I either like too, or at least don’t mind.

Sesame Street: A classic. I can’t stand that elephant, and Zoe and her pet rock, Rocco, are pretty annoying, but other than that we all enjoy the show. I like seeing the celebrities and hearing Cookie monster sneaking in a big word of the day, like esoteric or lachrymose.

SuperWhy: I don’t much care for it, but 4yo Drake really loves it, and intereracts and practices his reading.

WordWorld: Both 2yo Guppy and Drake enjoy this, and really like the characters. Plus that Build-a-Word song is really catchy.

WordGirl: This vocabulary show is a bit above Drake’s head, but he likes the cartoon about the city-saving girl superhero, as do I–it reminds me of the dear, departed Tick cartoon.

Fetch with Ruff Ruffman: Again, I think some of this goes over Drake’s head, but the cartoon parts are quite funny, and the kid parts are interesting.

Have we ever watched all five shows in a day, for a whopping total of three hours of TV? Yup. We’ve all been sick, the weather’s been crap. This is yet another one of those humbling parental admissions. I’m sure at some point in the past I said superciliously, “I’d NEVER use TV as a babysitter. I’d never let my kids watch hours of TV at a time.” Well, once again, my “I Never” has come to pass, and I’ve been knocked down a peg. One of the many lessons I’ve learned in parenting: Those “I Nevers” come back to haunt me. Or rather, taunt me.

From TV guru Sepinwall, a video of one of my favorite bands that references one of my favorite television shows: Old 97’s sing “Dance with Me” while a Battlestar geek pursues Tricia Helfer.

Spoilers below, as I discuss who won and who didn’t.

I found a lot of drama in the finale. I was surprised and impressed to see Lisa show us the chef she could be–not only getting along with her sous chef, but psyched to work with a pro, doing things she’d done badly before, but doing them well, like the prawns, the soup and the dessert, and overall having a sense of calm, and finally deserved sense of self confidence. She almost won; I don’t think ANYONE saw that coming .

I cry foul that they were required to do dessert. Dessert should always be extra credit for a chef.

I felt terrible for Richard. He’s a much more talented chef than his meal showed, and I think he put too much time into being clever (e.g., the dish titles) and not enough into making just really good food. His comment that he choked impressed me with its integrity, as it did Ted Allen. He didn’t bluster, he didn’t get defensive, he spoke out honestly in a way that probably was to Stephanie’s advantage.

Stephanie won for her pork, and in spite of her dessert. But I think her meal and her win show what we’ve seen all along–she’s a calm, steady, skilled chef, who impressed quietly with small innovations like the pistachios that Ted couldn’t stop talking about, rather than with big ones like Richard’s nitrogen and smoker. That she only won the one quickfire was an index of this, too. As far as I can say without having tasted her food, she deserved the win, and I think it’s weird that so many in the blogosphere assume shenanigans behind the scenes in the judging.

So, to Stephanie: good luck and well done! I hope to visit Chicago and eat in your restaurant someday.

To Richard: you are an honorable person and a great chef. You had a bad night, but you will have many more great ones.

To Lisa: you finally showed some positive spirit and some consistent cooking. Keep moving in that direction, and good luck.

Fables is one of the consistently best comic books in any genre. A worthy successor to fantasy comic Sandman, by Neil Gaiman, Fables is the ongoing saga of fairytale characters in our “mundy” world, and their ongoing struggle against The Adversary, a powerful Fable intent on conquest. “The Good Prince” stars one of the series’s most sympathetic supporting characters, janitor Ambrose Flycatcher, better known as The Frog Prince. For years he subsisted in a barely conscious fugue in order to forget how he saw his family killed and home stolen by armies of The Adversary. As he returns to himself and faces the truth, he is presented with a quest, which he faces without flinching.

“The Good Prince” is a well-nigh perfect story. Strong characters, powerful story elements–villains, love, intrigue, chivalry, redemption–and beautiful art combine in a compelling whole. I had problems with the previous Fables graphic novel, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, I read, but not with this one, which I enjoyed tremendously.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is my book group’s next selection. It is the Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize winning epic novel of the Joads, a sharecropping family from Oklahoma. They’re evicted from their farm during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they pack their belongings into an undependable vehicle, and set out for the promised land of California. As with the biblical story of the Israelites exodus from Egypt, the journey is far more difficult than the Joads hoped it would be.

Every strong novel redefines our conception of the genre’s dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. Like other products of rough-hewn American genius–Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (three other “flawed” novels that also humanize America’s downtrodden by exposing social ills)–The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: part naturalistic epic, part jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel. –from the Introduction by Robert DeMott

Criticism of the novel tends to extremes. Some hail it as a masterpiece. Others called it didactic, sentimental and overblown. Critics complained of its flat characterizations.

I found it a powerful, moving novel that had a strong historic effect on injustice in its time. I agree with all the above criticisms, though. The novel alternates between “telling” chapters of analysis, and “showing” chapters of the Joad’s journey. This interrupts the main narrative, and I found obvious and repetitive. The Joads are sympathetic, but reductive characters. They are “noble savages“, and barely flawed or complex in any way. Tom, the son who returns at the start of the novel, meets a former preacher named Casy who joins the Joads. Tom and Casy can be seen respectively as analogs to Jesus and John the Baptist, or to Jesus and Doubting Thomas. In his effort to detail the hardships of the Joads, Steinbeck painfully detailed many of the degrading details of their new life. This leads to a greater understanding of the difficulties of the time, but was difficult to slog through over 619 pages. Chapter 16 is forty-three pages long, and concerned mainly with a broken rod in the car, and how a replacement is located and replaced. The novel ends with a deliberately provocative scene in which Rose of Sharon, who recently delivered a stillborn baby, offers her breast to a starving stranger. This heavy-handed scene conveys Steinbeck’s idealization of the poor’s willingness to share to survive, as well as his romanticization of mothers that pervaded through the book. (I believe there is a Biblical or saint myth about a woman nursing a man in prison, but I am still searching for the reference.)

A recent article by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post questioned whether the “earnest but artless” Steinbeck’s works are ones that speak more to younger readers than to older ones, and wonders at their enduring popularity. Had I read Grapes of Wrath when I was younger, I might have been less attuned to matters of craft, and perhaps not as sensitive to being preached to on matters of social and political justice. As a more experienced reader, I appreciated the well-meaning passion of the work, and the effect it had on society at the time. I can’t, however, recommend it as a masterpiece.

Added later: I still can’t find a religious reference for a woman breastfeeding a man in jail, though I remember seeing an old painting of this in an Italian chuch. But just a little research turned up many, many similarities between the gospel of Luke and Grapes of Wrath.

Well, our little family is either on our third virus in 5 weeks, or on the third version and second iteration of the virus we got at the beginning of May. Either way, we’ve been sick since then, and can’t seem to get enough rest to kick it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details. Supplements and vitamins haven’t done doodly squat. I feel like we’re the Schleprock family, with a little raincloud following us about. I’m bitter, cranky (even more so than I usually am!) and hope this is the final round till virus season begins again in October.

Entertainment Weekly had their Summer TV preview last week. They name A & E’s Mad Men summer TV’s number 1 hidden gem. I really enjoyed the first season. The art direction and costumes are stunning and the complex characters are all disintegrating in various and fascinating ways.

EW recommends 10 other shows to check out this summer. I second their recommendations for Breaking Bad, Reaper, Friday Night Lights, and Bones. They’re uneven, but when they’re good they’re great.

I can’t comment on their cable choices: Flight of the Conchords, In Treatment and Brotherhood. We don’t get movie channels, and given how overloaded our Tivo drive is, I think that’s a good thing.

Finally, I know that Greek, The Paper and Gossip Girl are supposed to be enjoyable, but I can’t muster the energy for them. Either I’m burned out on teen shows (fare thee well, Veronica Mars) or my roster of B shows is full; see the above recommendations.

AFI has a special, 10 Top 10, on US tv next Tuesday, June 17, 2008, naming their top ten films in ten categories. Take a movie quiz (I’m a MOVIE MASTER, with 34 out of 40 correct) or try to pick the 10 winners in a contest. There are some tough questions, but some good ideas for stuff to see, though there were some headscratchers in there, too. Clash of the Titans for Best Fantasy? Really?