I called my husband G. Grod in last night during the Daily Show to watch the Iron Man trailer with me. It was stunning. I was enthralled. Until I saw the date: May 2008. And then I was pissed.
Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune reports that the actors are saying that season four will be the final one, and it will be shown in two 10-episode blocks, one starting February 2008, the other February of 2009.
What does this mean? That they have twenty more episodes to bring closure to one of the biggest, most complex dramatic series on television, and that we faithful will have to wait TWENTY MONTHS to see if they can pull it off.
TWENTY MONTHS! That’s time enough to have two babies.
Can we all just acknowledge that Tim Gunn and Bravo are throwing Project Runway fans a bone so they can delay the next season, and try to double dip on viewers?
TGGtS is not a bad show. But it’s just another makeover show, elevated by Gunn’s tart humor, exacting taste, and impressive cadre of “friends”. I really liked his recoil when co-star Veronica Webb mentioned leggings. She was clearly more than set decoration; her opinions were strong, and both Tim and the make-over-ee respected them. The first contestant was clearly going to be a slam dunk. She was gorgeous and in good shape, she just didn’t know it or dress for it. The show’s product placements and name dropping felt obstrusive, especially the diamond ring.
Two Project Runway contestants were introduced. Chris has flamboyant clothes and charisma, but seems like he’s aping Jay McCarroll too deliberately. Jillian is cocky, but has no on-screen personality.
This entry feels about as disjointed as the episode did, though I won’t try to push your buttons and make you cry. You’re welcome.
#36 in my 2007 book challenge was Clubbing, written by Andi Watson with wart by Josh Howard. It’s from the DC Comics Minx line of graphic novels. I’ve really enjoyed some of Andi Watson’s work, like Geisha and Slow News Day. Clubbing was a huge disappointment.
London goth girl Charlotte “Lottie” Brooks is exiled to the country with her grandparents after being caught with a fake ID. There is the standard geeky cute boy that the heroine comes to appreciate over the course of the book. The story, though, takes a bizarre twist once Lottie arrives in the country, and ends up as a supernatural mystery. Had it been well done, I might have appreciated the subversion of expectations. Instead, it read like a Season 7 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Not a good thing.)
While the story might appeal to bubble-headed eleven-year olds, any charm was lost on me. Lottie was as self-absorbed, irritating, and foolish as a girl can get. Not recommended.
I didn’t win any ribbons at the fair this year. Apparently my four entries were small potatoes compared to the woman who hogged all the awards. Worse, she sounds too charming to dislike for it.
Hope, expectation, Bright promises.
The Moon is a card of magic and mystery - when prominent you know that nothing is as it seems, particularly when it concerns relationships. All logic is thrown out the window.
The Moon is all about visions and illusions, madness, genius and poetry. This is a card that has to do with sleep, and so with both dreams and nightmares. It is a scary card in that it warns that there might be hidden enemies, tricks and falsehoods. But it should also be remembered that this is a card of great creativity, of powerful magic, primal feelings and intuition. You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial; if you have any past mental problems, you must be vigilant in taking your medication but avoid drugs or alcohol, as abuse of either will cause them irreparable damage. This time however, can also result in great creativity, psychic powers, visions and insight. You can and should trust your intuition.
What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.
If only they weren’t so darn accurate of late.
(Link thanks to A Bland and Deadly Courtesy)
I thought a few pieces of our regular junk mail were inevitable–the weekly supermarket circulars, and the handful of coupon mailings addressed only to resident. I am happy to announce that I was wrong. Each marketing piece has a website, and each website has contact information, and I’ve removed myself from four of these nuisances recently. Kicking the junkmail can be daunting, but it’s worth it. There’s so much less coming into our house, and therefore so much less that I have to consider, sort, and throw away.
The copy of Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World that I’m reading is an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) I picked up for $2.98 at my used bookstore. I have a few other ARCs on my shelves, that I’ve either bought used, or was given by kind bookstore friends. But since my to-read pile is usually so large that the book is not only released in HC, but available in TPB or even MMPB by the time I get to reading it, I want to eschew ARCs. They’re full of typos, so they offend my copyeditor sensibilities. They can contain narrative mistakes. They’re usually larger, cheaper quality, and uglier than the for-sale editions. I’m not saying I need to buy any more books. But I can use my library and get an actual copy in about the time it would take me to get around to a distractingly imperfect and homely ARC.
Last week’s Top Chef episode 7, Guilty Pleasures, featured a bait-and-switch strategy. The chefs were told they were going out, and got dressed up. Once at the club, though, they were pressed into catering to the closing hour munchies of the other patrons. Some of them rolled with this better than others. Sara was asked to pack her knives, because she was slow to produce an underseasoned burger and terrible milkshake. Interestingly, though Howie’s sandwich was also reviled, and their team was taken to task for communication problems, he was not given the boot. The week before, Joey got sent packing because he wouldn’t listen to Hung. But this week, Howie didn’t get sent packing, even though he didn’t talk to Sara.
Episode 8, Restaurant Wars, was itself a bait-and-switch. Everyone is warned that competition is more fierce because the winner of the quickfire no longer gets immunity. CJ squanders his advantage by picking a weak team. What was with Casey’s pissed look as Brian and she joined the team? Not only was it clear to me that it’s Casey who’s going to get the boot (she’s the one who looks like she’s on the verge of tears in the studio interviews) but both teams did such a bad job of the impossible task of opening a restaurant that they got a mulligan, so it’s to be continued, and we won’t find out for sure till next week who is eliminated. To add insult to injury, the judges didn’t critique the chefs much. Instead, Padma read aloud from a blogger’s comments, and used her criticisms instead of the judges table. Oh, yes, great idea to have a guest judge of Daniel Boulud, then hand all the judgment to a blogger? Feh.
I think there were plenty of candidates for booting: Brian fell apart up front, Dale’s decor was awful, Tre had inedible potatoes, and Howie had bad and heavy risotto. Why not just send Howie home instead of drawing out the misery for another week?
I love lists. I make them. I cross things off. There are a few problems, though.
One is that I don’t throw away lists every day. If there are things left undone, I keep the lists, but still make new ones. Is this a cause or effect of my anxious nature? I don’t know.
Another problem is that I have a very active monkey mind, and tend to write whatever pops into my head on a list, with no regard to whether it’s reasonable, achievable, or quantifiable. So my lists are not only always setting myself up for failure, but they’re also accumulating to remind me of my “failure” to achieve these ridiculous, impossible goals.
(Do you, like me, often mis-type “goal” as “gaol”? Significant, I think.)
I refer not only to task lists, but also to amazon wish lists, reading lists, listening lists, and watching lists. My lists for these have become so bloated that I hardly check them anyway.
I have a practice that I’ve abandoned for a while, and I think it’s time to resurrect. It’s to stop making lists. Instead, it’s to take the moment, when it arises, and calmly consider the next thing to do/read/buy/etc. It relies on trusting both myself and the universe to remember intriguing things, and to remind me of them enough times to fix them in my consciousness. If a book, or cd, or movie, is meant to be in my life, I hope to be reminded of it enough times that I don’t need to write it on a list.
It’s a sound plan. I have considered, and quailed before, the idea of deleting and throwing away all my current lists. Right now it’s all I can do not to make new ones. That is significant progress, so I’ll leave it at that for today.
Yes, I know that life isn’t all happy bunnies and sunshine, or Oprah and bonbons. I think a great deal of my struggle with post-partum depression was that my pregnancy and the adjustment to a second child were so much harder and longer than I’d expected. Further, they upset the rhythm and routine that G. Grod, Drake and I had established. While I knew to accept disruption for a while, the continued chaos and difference of every day wore on me. It felt like body surfing–the variety of waves can be exciting. But once I was tired, I couldn’t withdraw to the beach; I was stuck in the ocean, constantly facing new and different varieties of challenge.
Even now that Guppy is a year and a half, I still struggle to settle our life into routine. It continues to elude me, though. The best I can do for now is to rest, take short breaks, try to look ahead, and not get frustrated when things go awry, as they are so wont to do. We will eventually have a routine, and the peace and comfort that it brings.
I yearn for a simple life, without literal or metaphorical clutter. Two kids, a house, and modern life, though, seem to conspire against me. Near constant vigilance is required to stem the tide of too much stuff. I give baby items my boys have outgrown to friends. I donate regularly. I take myself off mailing lists, but still, the crap creeps in. One of the most superfluous bits of modern junk is the podcast. I steer clear because life is too short, and my limited time too valuable.
M. from Mental Multivitamin periodically expresses the need for “no”. I recently agreed with Lazy Cow that I often hear M’s advice in my head, and count myself fortunate for it. She is a passionate advocate for the value of one’s time, especially as it relates to learning and writing.
I recently attended a writing workshop. I enjoyed it, and thought the writing within the group was very good. When the address list for the class was passed around, though, I didn’t add my email address. I feared looking snobbish and exclusionary. But I couldn’t subject myself to a mailing list, no matter how well intentioned. Some might argue that it’s quick and easy to delete. But it still takes time, and consideration that I want to spend on my current emails from friends and family, and the considerable backlog of correspondence I’ve got dating from when Guppy was born. The address list went around a second time. I think the woman sitting next to me thought I’d been skipped on the first time around. I steeled my resolve, though, and passed it on. I wish the others well in their writing, but I want to spend what little time I have on my writing, not on email about writing.
If you other parents have read truck books as many times as I have, you may have wondered at the difference, if any, between concrete and cement. Sometimes trucks are referred to as cement mixers, other times they’re called concrete mixers. Concrete is a mixture of cement plus gravel and sand, so they’re not the same thing. Concrete contains cement; cement is an ingredient of concrete. Concrete has more letters than cement; I try to remember the difference this way.
or how Entertainment Weekly lured me to the dark side. It’s summer and my normal TV shows are in reruns (House, Bones, The Office, My Name is Earl, Battlestar Galactica) or worse, cancelled (RIP Veronica Mars). Because I have so much free time for myself (ha!) I let myself be swayed by good reviews in Entertainment Weekly to check out some new shows, which I did in one big TV free-for-all last weekend. Without exception, I was disappointed.
Mad Men: Nice to look at, but there’s a reason we moved beyond the era of smoking and sexism. There are better ways to depict this age that feel modern. This just felt like an out and out mimic, though I was surprised by the ending of the pilot.
Burn Notice: Average, at best. Cheesy repeated camera shots. The lead actor didn’t engage me, Gabrielle Anwar’s collagen duck lip irritated me, and Bruce Campbell looked so overweight, tired and indifferent that I just felt bad for him.
Psych: Enjoyable enough, but leaving nothing afterward. Like cotton candy.
Simon Schama’s Power of Art: I’d prefer it if this show were a half hour long and reporter style, rather than having staged enactments of Schama interacting with the art, and recreations of the artist. I like the works of Rothko, and was interested to find out more, but couldn’t bring myself to stay with this show for more than half an hour.
There is good news, though. Reruns of both 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother are funny, clever, and easy on the schedule at 30 minutes minus commercials. If you haven’t already, check them out.
Becca notes that while the bridge collapse is tragic, some of the media coverage of it is just pathetic.
My friend JV emailed me, wondering if my elder was screaming more than my younger, as his were. I replied that I am painfully, head-splittingly familiar with this scenario. Drake, at nearly 4yo, screams frequently. His screams are like grenades that set off adjacent sound bombs in Guppy, and soon we’ve got a full-circle echo screamfest. That is usually the point at which I think despairingly, “I like quiet. My life used to be quiet.”
My husband, G. Grod, theorizes that it’s because Drake has recently begun thinking ahead to what he thinks is going to happen. When things don’t go his way, he has only limited vocab and emotional experience to deal with it, so he starts to scream out his frustration. In other words, G thinks that he’s learning the painful lesson that “expectations are pre-planned resentments”.
I’ve got a very bare toolbox for the screaming. I try to empathize, use a calm voice and ask for quiet politely.
The more I communicate with other people, and other parents, the more I realize how non-unique we are. Yeah, we’re all individuals, but at some level, in many ways, we’re not. As the cook notes in one of our favorite picture books, Two Eggs, Please, “Different, but the same.”
I am stopped on page 520 of 606 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I can’t bring myself to resume the book. I have been trying to read it as quickly as possible. I was chagrined not to finish it before I left for the writing retreat I’m on this weekend. I’ve taken it out at every opportunity. I sit in the corner of the cafeteria with my book propped in front of me at meals, in case anyone thinks I want to be social. I’ve completed writing exercises quickly in order to take out my book and read on.
I don’t feel so bad about this. While we write, our instructor, Faith Sullivan, the author of The Cape Ann, Gardenias, and other novels, opens the book she’s reading, which is Heat Wave by Penelope Lively. Bookish behavior made me an outcast in grade school, but is something I celebrate today.
Given all this, then, I am surprised at my sudden aversion to finishing the novel. I want to find out what happens!
And yet, and yet…
When it’s over, it will be over. All seven books done that I’ve been reading for nearly ten years. The characters–Ron, Hermione, Harry. The locations–Hogwarts, Diagon Alley. The details–pumpkin juice, spells, jinxes and charms. Yeah, Rowling’s writing isn’t flawless, and her characters haven’t changed that much over the seven years of the books. But I LIKE the books. Rowling has the storytelling knack that makes a reader desperately want to find out what happens next. I’ve enjoyed the Harry Potter books. I’ve found pleasure in reading them. And like Steven King, I’m going to be sad when the series is done, no matter who lives or dies.
#1
You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion….I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.–Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990)
#2
according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)
#3
[Cowen] lists eight strategies for taking control of one’s reading, which include ruthless skipping around, following one character while ignoring others, and even going directly to the last chapter. Your eighth-grade English teacher would faint. But the principle here is valuing the scarcity of your own time, which people often fail to do. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)
I’m a reader. I believe in the power of stories and the magic of books. This does not mean I finish every book I start. I give books 50 pages; by then if I’m annoyed or disengaged, I stop. There are too many other books I WANT to read for me to waste time on books I don’t care for. Like Cowen, I value my time, which is all the more scarce after having two children.
Like Bayard, it’s not just possible, but common, for me have an opinion on a book I haven’t read. I qualify my opinion by admitting that, though. I’m allowed to think that The DaVinci Code is poorly written and that its story is intriguing. But I haven’t read it; I’ve only synthesized what I’ve heard and read ABOUT it. My opinion is theoretical, because it’s based on the testimony of others, not experience of my own.
Yet I’m still bothered by the cavalier attitude of Cowen and Bayard. Most good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If Cowen and Bayard practice–even celebrate–this literary dilettantism, they may have opinions (to which they are entitled, as are we all), but they are partial, and thus limited. And if Cowen and Bayard don’t disclose their partial knowledge, then they’re being less than honest.
In the end, I think it’s like what Robin Williams’s character said about smoking in Dead Again:
Someone is either a [reader] or a non[reader]. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that. If you’re a non[read]er, you’ll know.
I’m a reader. I suspect you are, too. Don’t read what you don’t want to. But stories in their entirety are most often greater than the sum of their parts. Don’t listen to the dilettantes. To paraphrase another movie:
Read… or read not. There is no try.
#25 in my 2007 book challenge was Elizabeth Gilbert’s spiritual travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love. This was my second time reading it, since it was also book #16 for me this year.
Gilbert is smart, funny, and honest. She notes that she’s good at making friends, and it’s easy to see why. After a nasty divorce, a disastrous rebound relationship, and a deep depression, Gilbert goes abroad for a year. Her first four months are spent in Rome, practicing the language and enjoying the food. Next she goes to an ashram in India to practice meditation and mindfulness. Finally, she spends the rest of the year in Bali, where she seeks to integrate divine and earthly experiences into holistic joy.
I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it
This book made me hungry in my stomach for Rome. My searching soul perked up at the descriptions of the ashram in India. Though I’ve practiced yoga for seven years, I’d never before had the slightest urge to visit its country of origin. In the last 6 months, though, I’ve read this book twice, another book on India I loved, sat next to a man on an airline flight who gave me several tips about about traveling there, and have a friend there right now. I’m sensing a building Indian zeitgeist.
As before, the thing I disliked about the book was Gilbert’s use of religious terminology. She chooses to use He/Him to refer to God. She denies any belief in God’s sex, but the masculine pronoun only perpetuates the usual patriarchal stereotypes. (I’ve noted before that I think the American Heritage Dictionary has a nice note on the problems with “he”–scroll about halfway down the page to get to the AH entry.) She doesn’t wonder why Christianity is one of the few world religions that has a thunder god, but no fertility goddess. She uses the Christian designation for eras, BC/AD. These are widely known, but CE/BCE (Common Era, and Before Common Era) are more inclusive, and more correct, since the historic person Jesus didn’t get born in the year 0 anyway. She also uses the reductive and condescending term “Judeo-Christian”. This is problematic because it implies a cause/effect relationship that both oversimplifies the complex origins of Christianity, and wrongly implies that Christianity is a natural extension of Judaism.
It’s likely that I’m nitpicking because of my residual grad-school sensibilities, so these may not be things that would bother others. In spite of them, I highly recommend the book, and am eager to seek out her previous work.
From Suicide Girl News: Brad Pitt wants to channel Steve McQueen in a remake of Bullitt. I agree that it’s a bad idea. Remakes are a bad idea in general, and revisiting McQueen specifically requires a lot of chutzpah. Can you think of any remakes that are better than the original? I’m sure there are some, just as there are a handful of movies whose sequel outstrips the first (Godfather Part II), and even a few third movies that are the pick of the litter (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Off the top of my head, though, I can’t think of one movie substantively improved by a remake.
At the end of the Suicide Girls piece, the author notes that many may not even have seen the McQueen movie from which his nickname is taken. It made me realize that there are a few great war movies that don’t make the top 100 lists, yet which I’ve appreciated far more than I did the carnage-strewn Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, or Saving Private Ryan.
Three Unsung War Movies:
The Great Escape: great ensemble cast, unforgettable theme song, and the origin of The Cooler King, a critical piece of filmic cultural literacy.
Stalag 17: Surprisingly, NOT the basis for Hogan’s Heroes, whose creators were sued over similarities, and won. Holden thought his character was too cynical, but he won an Oscar for the role.
The Thin Red Line: Terence Malick’s beautiful filmic meditation on the brutal rift that war creates between humanity and nature.