Girl Detective

Still another 2007 book inspired by The Morning News’ Tournament of Books, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England was on my TBR list already, based on the strong review in Entertainment Weekly:

One little mistake, and Pffft – your life goes up in smoke. Ten years after Sam Pulsifier accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson’s childhood home, he becomes Suspect No. 1 when other scribes’ homes get flamed. Who’s really to blame? This absurdly hilarious mystery, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England about a bumbler’s guilt-consumed life skewers the whole memoir thing and offers a fact/fiction-blurring meditation on the risky business of self-deception: ”Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.” A killer line in Brock Clarke’s searingly funny book. A-

Sam is an engaging guy, whose bumbling sometimes induces cringes, and sometimes demands sympathy. It’s a funny book, and the clever, quotable lines come fast and furious. But it sometimes felt a little too meta, at the expense of real, human emotion.

If you find lines like this funny:

She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me.

you’ll likely enjoy the book. Arsonist’s Guide didn’t win its match, but its blend of smart, funny, and sad made it well worth reading.

Degree of Difficulty: Easy

Q: Mom, is this a berry?

A: No, that’s rabbit poop. Please put it back on the ground.

Degree of Difficulty: Medium

Q: Mom, why couldn’t the old man get up in the morning?

A: Because if you bump your head, you need more sleep.

(Not a word about how drunk he must’ve been to bump his head AFTER he went to bed. Wow, I don’t know anyone who got so drunk they fell and got a concussion. Oh, wait, yes I do. Ah, college. Good times. And no, it wasn’t me. You know who you are if you’re reading.)

Degree of Difficulty: Hard

Q: Mom, what is ‘killed’?

A: Um, where did you hear that? Oh, the Disney movie we watched yesterday? (Grrr.) It means your body gets hurt so badly that it can’t get up.

(Hmm, maybe the old man wasn’t just sleeping it off.)

Entertainment Weekly’s article ( part of which is here) on the Indiana Jones movies said, “Relive Raiders.” I did, and I enjoyed it. It also said, “Stop Underrating the Sequels”:

Doom is one of cinema’s greatest sequels–and one of Spielberg’s most underrated efforts–precisely because it’s so black and daring.

Fair enough, I thought so I revisited Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.. I had only ever seen Doom once, in the theater 24 years ago. I didn’t like it then, but things change. Alas, I feel about the same as I did the first time I saw it; Doom is overlong and repetitive, plus Kate Capshaw is a shrew.

Karen Allen’s Marian was hardly portrayed as a strong woman in Raiders–yes, she owned her own bar and won a drinking contest, but she also trusted a monkey who betrayed her, failed to escape from the villain, and spent much of the film shouting for Indie to save her. Capshaw’s Willie Scott was even worse; hardly the characterization I’d hope for from a future husband. She was shrill, foolish, greedy for diamonds, and worried about breaking her nails. Some critics believe this role killed her career.

EW is right that the dark humor and daring child-labor plot are points in the film’s favor, as are its winks at the Bond films, given that Spielberg had initially envisioned this series along that line. What sinks the film are its tired stereotypes and poor filmmaking. There’s too much repetition, e.g., cutaway shot after shot of alligators chomping down bad guys at the end. Also, its timing is off. The underground mine ride toward the end goes on so long that I went through all the Kubler-Ross stages of grief:

1. Denial: this isn’t so bad; it’s kind of fun
2. Anger: why is this going on so long; why can’t it end?
3. Bargaining: maybe if I stare at the ceiling and yawn, it will end
4. Depression: nope, still there. I wonder if this was conceived from the get go to be a ride at Universal Studios?
5. Acceptance: oh, thank goodness, the scene is over. I’ll never have to watch it again.

In conclusion, Entertainment Weekly was wrong. This isn’t a strong sequel. For that, see The Bourne Supremacy, or The Godfather II, or Aliens. Or even The Empire Strikes Back. But you can skip this. Any fun, dark moments are completely overwhelmed by poor character, story and editing choices.

In anticipation of the May 22 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I re-visited Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in a long time. Entertainment Weekly did a good feature on the series, and had this to say:

Raiders obliterated those wheezy old rules [of beginnings, middles, and ends] by plunging headfirst into the good stuff. In fact, it is a movie entirely made up of good stuff–115 minutes of unrelenting climaxes stacked up on top of one another.

It was good in the theater when I was thirteen; it’s good at home now that I’m forty. This is such straightforward, pure entertainment that Spielberg and Lucas made it look effortless, though this is belied by its near inability to be duplicated.

Alas, the film, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, is not as wise and funny as the excellent book from Persephone Books, but it is nonetheless entertaining.

The film starts off hyperkinetic, and only when it settled down about twenty minutes in did I begin to enjoy myself. Adams is charming as the American “actress” in London with three boyfriends, and McDormand is utterly sympathetic as a down and out governess who shows up for the wrong job. The sets and costumes are pretty and fun, but I think the director was a bit too enamored of them. There were far too many circling shots; take some Dramamine if you are prone to motion sickness. And there is a decidedly naughty homoerotic subtext for the women. But the quiet performances by McDormand and Ciaran Hinds, plus the hints of the looming war, provide an anchor that doesn’t let this fluffy film completely float away.

Last week I went with my friend Becca to see Lionel Shriver, author of The Post-Birthday World, one of my favorite books of last year. I already knew Lionel was a woman, and I was not surprised that she was smart and funny in person. I’d assumed that she was English, since her bio says she lives in London and because she won The Orange Prize for her last novel. Yet when she began to speak, her accent was decidedly American, occasionally drawn out as from the South, though she certain words had the elongated sounds of London. She was born in North Carolina, and went to Columbia University. And she changed her name to Lionel at 15 just because she liked the sound of it and had never heard of it before.

Last night I took 4yo Drake and 2yo Guppy out for what I hoped was a quick trike ride and toddler walk up and down the street while G. Grod made dinner. (Chicken Piccata, which I wanted to try because one of the contestants on Top Chef last week didn’t know what it was.)

I told them clearly that dinner was soon, and we could only go up and down our side of the street. Guppy kept going down the street, toward the busy intersection by the park. Drake pedaled up the street, then began to scream that he didn’t want to turn around, he wanted to cross the street or turn the corner. I told both of them no; both began to scream.

Prioritizing, I left Drake at the corner, since he had his trike and because he was less likely to go into the street than his brother. I ran down the block after Guppy, picked him up, carried him home under my arm and deposited him on the front porch. I went outside; Drake was still screaming up the street at the corner, and the neighbor whose house he was in front of was asking him where his mom was. I called out that I was coming, jogged to the end of the street and asked Drake to come with me. When he refused, I picked him up, put him under my arm, and took him back to our porch. I then went back to the corner to fetch the tricycle. The neighbor poked her head out the front door.

“Good job, Mom!” She called. “Way to remain calm. You never lost your temper. Gold stars for you.”

I felt quite cheered by her praise as I lugged the tricycle home. Many people would have responded with judgment that the kids were throwing fits, or that I couldn’t “make” them behave. Why don’t more people praise mothers for muddling through as best we can?

Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. At home she had to be hyperconscious not to use books to retreat from her own children.

Continuing my Tournament of Books 2007 book binge, I finished Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know in double-quick time. I guiltily admit that I retreated into the book, and away from my kids, a few times. The premise is a grabber, and the storytelling delivers nicely. A woman flees the scene of a car accident. When she’s picked up by police, she has no ID, and claims to be one of two sisters who disappeared from a Baltimore mall thirty years ago in a famous abduction.

Lippman’s writing is tight. She switches back and forth in time and among characters so deftly that she makes it look easy. The mystery unfolds at a steady pace, with just enough revealed along the way to lead to the very satisfying conclusion.

Lippman is a former news reporter from Baltimore, and has a successful and well reviewed mystery series. This is a standalone novel, and a thumping good read that’s also well written. Highly recommended.

I started Laura Lippmann’s What the Dead Know yesterday. I went to bed at 10:30. When I couldn’t sleep, I happily got up and read for another 90 minutes. I don’t think I’ll be posting much till I’m done. Which I hope is soon.

A seamless transition from Project Runway 4 to Top Chef 4. There’s a thread for comments at ALoTT5MA.

Watching food shows at night makes me hungry. Wait, MORE hungry.

Another one from the Morning News Tourney of Books, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, was quite good. It won Match Two of Round One, and is moving on to challenge Tree of Smoke. Vida is married to Dave Eggers, though this is not detailed in the backflap bio or in her acks.

Clarissa is 28 when her father dies, and a quick search of his desk yields surprising and unpleasant news. Given that her mother disappeared when she was 14, Clarissa has already experienced life at the short end of the stick. Slipping into girl-detective mode, she decides to travel to Lapland, the region of Europe that includes the northern tips of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Painful truths about who she is arrive thick and fast on her journey. In the end, she incorporates them into choices that are both redemptive and unexpected.

The grieving, bewildered Clarissa is easy to like, as are the handful of characters she encounters on her odyssey. At times, this read like a young adult novel to me; Clarissa’s age of 28 didn’t ring true. She seemed more like 20, in speech, action, and emotion. But the fast-moving tale swept me along, and fascinated me both with details about Lapland and the indigenous Sami people, as well as with Clarissa’s absorption of the newly updated facts of her self.

At the Atlantic, Christopher Leinberger, a professor of urban planning, predicts dire things for the suburbs, and forecasts a shift back to urban, walkable living.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s–slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

Leinberger also notes how this move away from the suburbs is reflected in the media:

These days, when Hollywood wants to portray soullessness, despair, or moral decay, it often looks to the suburbs–as The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives attest–for inspiration.

This is in contrast, and a reaction to, the forces behind the birth of film noir in the 40’s, captured by Richard Schickel in his Wilson Center article, Rerunning Film Noir, which I’ve linked to before:

After [WWII], however, the city’s glamour became much darker and more menacing. Noir quickly noted the gathering flight to the suburbs and the countryside. Or, at least, the desire of many people to join that flight. The genre began to offer this dichotomy: the suburbs as a clean, spare, safe, if not very interesting place to love a plain little woman and to raise healthy, normal children, versus the city, whose glamour was at once more menacing and more tempting than it had ever been.

Back in real life, Leinberger doesn’t think there will be a total reversal, but he does see it moving more towards equilibrium:

Despite this glum forecast for many swaths of suburbia, we should not lose sight of the bigger picture–the shift that’s under way toward walkable urban living is a healthy development….I doubt the swing toward urban living will ever proceed as far as the swing toward the suburbs did in the 20th century; many people will still prefer the bigger houses and car-based lifestyles of conventional suburbs. But there will almost certainly be more of a balance between walkable and drivable communities–allowing people in most areas a wider variety of choices.

I find Leinberger’s article interesting, both because of the media reflections, and because our family lives in a small city house, within a mile of many things. Due to circumstances, we had little choice but to buy our house at the top of the bubble, but this gives me hope that we’ll eventually recoup at least some of that value, as well as continue to cultivate a one-car, walkable lifestyle.

(I thought the Leinberger link came from Arts & Letters Daily, but I can’t find it there. Apologies for the lack of proper linkage.)

I get off the library book wagon with On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, the first of (I hope) several books in the Morning News 2008 Tournament of Books that I hope to read.

And what they had here, on the shores of the English Channel, was only a minor theme in the larger pattern.

Florence and Ted are young newlyweds in 1962. Ted is a scholar and Florence a classical violinist. And both have serious concerns about the actions required of them on their wedding night, yet “they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

McEwan painstakingly, and often painfully, etches their thoughts, fears, history and conversation. Both Ted and Florence are rendered ever more complex over the course of the 200 small pages in this slim volume. The night becomes a microcosm of their relationship, and another key event in the lives of the two young people.

This is beautifully written, compassionate and it contains profound, universal truths about relationships, marriage, and communication between men and women. It is not a thumping good read; it requires care and attention to appreciate. Also, to me, this is not a novel. By artfully plumbing the depths of two people, and one encounter, this reads more like a short story, or at most a novella.

My husband and I tag teamed to the movies this weekend. This meant avoiding the cost of a sitter, both getting matinee prices, and that we didn’t have to agree on movies. He saw The Bank Job, which he liked a lot, and I saw Definitely, Maybe. It was pretty good.

Ryan Reynolds is about to get a divorce from the mother of his 8yo daughter. She demands the story of how her parents met. Disguising the details, he tells her about the three different women in his life, and has her guess which is her mom. Reynolds, though good looking, is a bit stiff in the lead. Abigail Breslin is sweet but not cloying as the daughter. Rachel Weisz and Elizabeth Banks do fine jobs, Kevin Kline steals every scene he’s in, but Isla Fisher as April is the standout, along with her subplot about a copy of Jane Eyre. Definitely, Maybe is good, not great, with a bit more substance, style and skill than most romantic comedies.

When I was in NYC last fall, my friend N and I passed Reynolds leaving Banana Republic. He had thick, very reddish hair, and a very full beard. He looked quite different from the clean cut Will Hayes in this movie.

I am finally trying to catch up on my huge backlog of comments, because you are all awesome for writing me, and I am hugely lame for not commenting and replying. I manage a few replies, then get a message from Word Press:

You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.

So the spirit is willing but the free software is cranky. I’ll try again tomorrow. As always, thank you for commenting, and emailing, and I will try to reply to each one, someday!

As I continue to race through Bryan K. Vaughan’s Y the Last Man series, Volume 4: Safeword went down less easily than the previous three.

A plague wipes out all animals with a Y chromosome, except for Yorick Brown and his monkey, Ampersand. With a secret agent and a geneticist, they’re making their way across the country. This volume features BDSM that I initially felt was a little gratuitous, though it’s later explanation made sense. It also featured a band of deluded militia that I’d like to feel was over the top, but I fear might not be.

I’m not sure if it’s the book or me that’s slowing down, but I’m continuing on till the end. Stay tuned for future volumes.

I reread Fforde’s Eyre Affair because of my recent re-read of Jane Eyre, and because I hope to venture further in the Thursday Next series, which many friends have recommended to me. EA is great fun–a thumping good read. It contains some clumsy writing, but this hardly intruded on the breakneck pace of the story.

Thursday Next is a literary detective in a fictional England that so loves literature that citizens routinely change their names to that of their favorite poet; there are about four thousand John Miltons in London alone.

Claire Tomalin’s recent Guardian piece on her Milton collection of poems was linked to this week from Arts & Letters Daily. It gave me some timely insight into why Milton was Fforde’s fictive first choice.

After the theft of Dickens’ original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit, Thursday pursues a villain named Acheron Hades. He’s nearly invincible though, as he can read minds, is bulletproof and doesn’t appear on camera. There is a wild chase (but not a wild good chase; see below for why not), guns, vampires, evil corporate goons, an unending war, time travel, and many wonderful scenes with Mr. Rochester.

For other books I’ve read this year and last year, plus music and movies, visit my shelves at Gurulib.

From Dictionary.com, because the relevant passage in EA eludes me:

wild goose chase
1592, first attested in “Romeo and Juliet,” where it evidently is a fig. use of an earlier (but unrecorded) literal sense in ref. to a kind of follow-the-leader steeplechase.

I did such a good job of eschewing library books last year that I missed out on the good stuff from 2007. I hope to read several of the books competing for the Morning News’ 2008 Tournament of Books, but I’m having trouble putting my hands on a few that have too-long queues at the library. Does anyone have a copy that I might borrow of:

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

?

if so, let me know. I’m trying REALLY hard not to rush out and buy them.

One of my favorite books of last year was Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World, which was also EW reviewer Jennifer Reese’s top book of the year, though not everyone liked the diverging tale of a woman’s fateful decision to stay or go. Shriver is touring select US cities to promote the paperback publication of the book, and will be at the University of Minnesota Bookstore next Thursday March 13, 2008 at 4 pm for a reading and signing.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in Philadelphia, you can see Shriver on Tuesday March 11, along with Laura Lippman, whose What the Dead Know is one of The Morning News’s Sweet Sixteen for their 2008 Tournament of Books, and which I just checked out of the library. You can get the books from Joseph Fox Bookshop at 17th and Sansom Streets, where I used to get books for my book group of sacred memory. Then visit Genji Japanese Restaurant, and you’ll have me awash in nostalgia, and burning with jealousy.

Even if you don’t think you have six minutes, start watching Evolution of Dance and I suspect you’ll be there till the end, like I was. It’s a hilarious montage of pop dance moves over the last fifty-plus years. I almost spit out my Darjeeling when he did Thriller, though I question his placement of the Oompah Loompah song on the timeline.

My husband G. Grod sometimes uses Youtube videos to entertain the boys while I’m making dinner. 4yo Drake’s favorite is Fatboy Slim’s That Old Pair of Jeans, with juggling by Vova. I think Evolution of Dance will be a hit with the boys, while also giving us ideas for other videos to look up.