Girl Detective

As part of my pre-Oscar movie-watching binge, I saw Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play a young couple who meet cute in the 50’s, get pregnant, move to the suburbs, and take on the trappings of a conventional life. As they struggle against the constraints of expectations–theirs and everybody else’s–they become ever more desperate and unhappy. This is an emotionally brutal film, but one full of truths about marriage and society that still resonate today.

Winslet is wonderful, DiCaprio slightly less so. Michael Shannon, nominated for a Best-Supporting Actor, is disturbingly sharp as the mentally ill son of a friend. Sometimes, though, I became aware of the swelling music, or the actor’s intensity felt a little too “look at me; I’m acting!” Overall, however, a provocative and well done film, with beautiful images and strong performances.

As per my new movie/book plan (which I noted here), I’ll try to read the Richard Yates novel this year now that I’ve seen the film. Reading books before the film wreaks havoc with my reading schedule, and nearly always spoils the film. I’m interested to see if I agree or not with Nick Schager’s Slant review about the film, which says it’s superficially faithful, but ultimately misses the point.

Trivia: I spotted kid-friendly musician Dan Zanes as part of the swing band in a dive bar.

“Hear that hum?” my husband G. Grod asked before he left for work. “That’s the sump pump. It’s running continuously. I think it’s blocked. Probably not good.” He paused to shoulder his messenger bag. “Thanks for letting me vent my anxiety about that. I’m off to work.”

I picked up that anxiety right where he left it, as the hum droned on. I went outside to check the outtake pipe. Sure enough, the end of the pipe was frozen solid after yesterday’s thaw and last night’s freeze. I got a shovel, poured boiling water and salt on it, and managed to get the end clear. But the pump hummed on, trying so hard to get water out of our basement. I knew if something didn’t happen, the motor would give, or our basement would flood.

I checked the internet. I called my dad. Turns out the freeze probably went up a ways into the pipe, which was about eight feet long. One suggestion was to hook a hose to my hot water heater, put it out the window, and up the pipe, and move it up as the water melted. This worked, so I set about trying to warm the pipe in other ways, in and out of the house, donning and doffing my muddy boots, and braving the above-freezing but grey, windy and snizzling day. I heated water to boiling, but could only pour it on the pipe at either end–the middle was buried in dirt and ice. I tried a hair dryer on an extension cord, but that made hardly any difference in the wind. I chipped away at the mulch, dirt and ice first with a rake, then with a hand tool, then with a shovel, then with the edging tool. I made little progress through the layer of ice beneath. I also turned off the pump, to save the motor. I’d periodically plug it back in to see if things were clear.

After EIGHT HOURS of in and out, shoveling, ice chipping, water boiling, etc, the sump pumped, and then stopped. That silence was perhaps the happiest moment of my day.

My kids are prone to barfing. They’re not only susceptible to whatever stomach virus might be running around, but if they skip dinner (which they periodically do, in protest of my healthy, whole-food meals) their blood sugar drops so far that they throw up the first thing they eat in the morning.

After the latest virus visited now-3yo Guppy and 5yo Drake, I joked I was an expert at the barfing protocol. “What’s that?” someone asked. I learned what to do from the handbook my pediatrician gave at the first visit. Once I got the hang of it, I appreciated how effective it was–it limits the duration of the bout to about 6 or 8 hours. Those 6 to 8 hours are yucky ones, but much better than if they’d lasted 12 to 24, which is common when fluids and food are given too soon.

1. Wait ONE HOUR after vomiting before offering fluids. Sooner, and it will come right back up.

2. Start with small, frequent sips of clear liquids, no more than 1 ounce every 30 to 60 minutes. It’s tempting to give kids as much as they want; this will only lead to further vomiting. As hard as it is, limit the amount and speed of what they drink as best you can. I set a timer in the kitchen, so the kids can count down. It lessens (somewhat) the whining, pleading, and arguing. Give water, Pedialyte, Gatorade, white-grape juice, lemon-lime soda or ginger ale. Growing up, my parents would give us Jello water–one packet in twice the amount of water called for. Try to avoid things sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, though, as it’s been shown to contain mercury.

3. Once vomiting has stopped for 3 or 4 hours, you can increase the amount of fluids.

4. After 8 hours, you may begin a bland diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, toast, crackers, clear soups. Continue to serve tummy friendly foods for 24 hours after last vomiting.

I can scarcely believe it. I’ve gone through all my comments back through December. For most, I’ve replied in the comments.

I’ve begun to close comments after 2 weeks, to cut down on spam. Let me know if this seems too short a window. I was thinking up to a month, perhaps.

I may take a comment/email amnesty for everything before that, and declare email bankruptcy and start from scratch.

At Salon, Rebecca Traister examines some recent women’s confessional articles in “Girlie Gross Out”, and wonders if it’s liberating or too much information:

Oversharing is in. And for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it’s not so much “too much information” as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body.

Traister doesn’t draw a conclusion, and I’m not sure there is one. I had an experience very similar to one of the several described in the article. I talked about it at the time, but rarely do anymore. It scared people, and that didn’t seem kind to do.

I’m reminded of the hubbub over breastfeeding photos on Facebook. I breastfed both my kids until they were at least a year old, often in public. But I always tried to be in a quiet place, and be discreet. It was something between my kid and me; I didn’t and don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. Yes, I fully support and encourage women to breastfeed in general, and their right to do so in public. Yet while I see how photographs of this support that right, they also bug me–they _are_ too much information. Mommy friends of mine breastfeed their kids around me all the time; that’s great. But they don’t deliberately solicit my attention to it, as do public photos, and the type of articles described at Salon.

My own conclusion then, if there is one, can be only about me. I try not to overshare about the messy bits, except to my OB/GYN. If somebody else does it, I appreciate that there are positive aspects, but part of me would also be fine if I didn’t know that. I support someone else’s desire and right to do it, but also my own right to be ambivalent, bothered by it, or avoid it.

Link from The Morning News.

At Men’s Health, “The 20 Worst Foods of 2009” (link from The Morning News.) What simultaneously entertained and horrified me was the comparisons in the commentary for each selection, like the appetizer that has as many calories as THIRTEEN Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Susan Meddaugh’s Martha Speaks and its sequels became the basis for the current PBS Kids show–one of the better ones that’s more watchable for parents, in my opinion. Our family discovered the TV show first, then sought out the books from our library. Thus far, 5yo Drake and 3yo Guppy have enjoyed Martha Blah Blah, Martha Calling, though they don’t like Martha Walks the Dog, which has a mean, big dog. But we all enjoy Perfectly Martha, my favorite.

Martha is a dog who learns to speak English after she eats alphabet soup and the letters go to her brain. When a shifty man comes to town and promises dog owners he can train the pets to be perfect pups in a day, Martha is suspicious.

“Hmmmph!” Martha said to Skits. “Dogs are perfect already.”

Clever Martha figures out the scam, and goes about fixing things in her own talkative, assertive manner. She is a charming, capable heroine, and this book seems especially aimed at dog owners who love their pets, quirks and all. My sister Sydney would love it.

I can’t remember where I first came across a recommendation for Holly Keller’s Farfallina and Marcel, but it’s 3yo Guppy’s current favorite book. A caterpillar named Farfallina and a gosling named Marcel become friends, then are separated one day:

But one day Farfallina was not herself.

I’m not sick,” she told Marcel,

“just a little uncomfortable.

I need to climb up onto a branch and rest for a while.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Marcel called

as Farfallina made her way up the tree.

Marcel does wait, but as most parents know, Farfallina isn’t coming down immediately; there is a note at the beginning about metamorphosis. Marcel eventually gives up and returns to his pond. Farfallina wakes and looks for Marcel, but he is gone. The friends are sad at the loss, and don’t even recognize each other when they do meet again, though they eventually discover the truth.

Keller’s watercolors are simple and lovely, perfectly suited to this sweet, engaging tale of friendship that survives through change.

The New York Times had a recent article in its books section on number books for kids, and they highly recommended One Boy by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. At 5, my number-loving son Drake is perhaps a little old for it, but he and 3yo Guppy both love it.

One Boy is an illustrated counting-to-ten book, with die-cut pages that show words within words, e.g., “ONE Boy. AlONE.” and small pictures within larger ones. It has a clever, surprise ending and is overall quite charming. I will likely be getting this for our library at home, since our local branch doesn’t have its own copy. I’ll be seeking out Seeger’s other books, too.

Made with local Empire and Keepsake apples, using the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for pie dough with vodka, which I rolled out with my new French-style rolling pin.

Is the title an oxymoron?

From Half-Price Books:

The John McPhee Reader
David Copperfield
Hamlet
One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
Nicholas Nickleby

From Big Brain Comics:

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Thank goodness I gave up that silly “I need to stop buying more books” vow.

Links are to available copies at amazon, not necessarily the edition pictured.

A few of our favorite authors have earned their own shelves in our built-in buffet cabinet, based both on number of books and attractiveness. When I love a book, like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or Hamlet, I buy a lot of copies–for the illustrations, the footnotes, a cool cover, the introduction, portability, durability, whatever.

Jane Austen and Patrick O’Brian

Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte

Shakespeare

Eventually, she understood the house was keeping a secret from her.

All that winter and all through the spring, Almondine had known something was going to happen, but no matter where she looked she couldn’t find it. Sometimes, when she entered a room, there was the feeling that the thing that was going to happen had just been there, and she would stop and stare and peer around while the feeling seeped away as mysteriously as it had arrived.

I finally started The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and am enjoying it so far, though I’m only about 100 pages in. I like the prose, the dog point of view, the characters, and their relationships to their dogs. I was amused to see Pat Holt’s description of the book in her recent post on publishing:

big-sprawling-summer-novel+Hamlet gimmick+beautiful-writing+struggling author backstory+DOGS DOGS DOGS = Must Read.

(Link from Blog of a Bookslut)

At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, William Deresiewicz’s “The End of Solitude” details how the internet, Facebook et al. eat away at privacy:

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.

This is a more subtle, but no less concerning aspect of tech-induced privacy loss than that discussed in a recent Wired article, which I linked to in this entry.

I never knew how much I needed quiet and solitude until I had two children. So when I do have it, as I did this afternoon, I seize it gratefully, and don’t for one minute feel lonely.

Is it me, or does all the internet hubbub over Pride and prejudice and Zombies (a few of the many links: Galleycat, The Times, and The Guardian, ) reminiscent of Snakes on a Plane–something that people thought was hilarious in theory, but avoided in real life?

I’d heard about this cult film for some time, but it was only when Wet Hot American Summer was mentioned in most reviews of David Wain’s most recent film, Role Models, which I enjoyed, that I decided to see it finally.

Wet Hot American Summer is set in Maine at a Jewish summer camp in 1981. The outfits are hilarious, the hairstyles cringe-inducing, and the stereotypes broad, but still funny.

Now finish up them taters; I’m gonna go fondle my sweaters.

It’s a self-deprecating mash up of summer-camp, teen, and underdog/geek films. Paul Rudd is the handsome counselor so cool he doesn’t even have a cabin of kids. Janeane Garofalo is the camp director, David Hyde Pierce a nerdy neighbor on whom she has a crush, and Christopher Meloni the off-balance Vietnam vet who listens to a talking can of vegetables. Michael Showalter as geeky Coop, who has a crush on pretty Katie, Rudd’s girlfriend, is much less funny and charming than he ought to be as the lead. Instead he’s kind of creepy. I couldn’t tell if that was deliberate, since it’s such a wacky film, or if he had the role because he was the writer/producer.

I found it frequently hilarious. My husband G. Grod found it less so. But while he said he thought it was terrible, he watched most of the extras with me, so I think this one at least qualifies as a good-bad movie. It was mostly well-reviewed, especially by Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly, when it came out.

I recently read and enjoyed Little Brother, a near-future young-adult technothriller by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. It’s also recommended at Mental Multivitamin in the most recent On the Nightstand entry. The Little Brother of the title is Marcus, a hacker kid in San Francisco. After he’s arrested and held on suspicion of terrorism, he finds Homeland Security has used people’s fear as justification to invade privacy. He begins acts of electronic rebellion to circumvent electronic surveillance. He is later disappointed when those who held and tortured him are released with minimal punishment.

Two recent pieces show how timely and relevant are the issues raised in Little Brother. This piece in Wired (link from ALoTT5MA), “I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” by Mathew Honan, details how the GPS application of the iPhone can be manipulated:

I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score–a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior–a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

In “Forgive Not,” a New York Times Op-Ed, Dahlia Lithwick recently decried the tendency to exonerate torturers because it’s painful to acknowledge complicity:

Indeed, the almost universal response to the recent bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee – finding former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials directly responsible for detainee abuse that clearly rose to the level of torture – has been a collective agreement that no one need be punished so long as we solemnly vow that such atrocities never happen again.

She argues that the torturers shouldn’t be above the law, or forgiven in the wave of hope brought in by a new administration:

I believe that if it becomes clear that laws were broken, or that war crimes were committed, a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate further. The Bush administration made its worst errors in judgment when it determined that the laws simply don’t apply to certain people. If we declare presumptively that there can be no justice for high-level government officials who acted illegally then we exhibit the same contempt for the rule of law.

If you’re interested or concerned about issues like these, read Little Brother if you haven’t, already. And see how quickly fiction has become science and history.

At the Times Online, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (which I always confuse–understandably, I think–with David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green) gives ten rules for life in a random world. (Link from Boing Boing)

“Your last recourse against randomness is how you act – if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.”

Neil Gaiman, author of umpteen things, won the Newbery Award last week for The Graveyard Book, and had an amusing reaction to the notification call. (Link from Bookslut)

Gaiman, originally from England, lives just over the Minnesota border in Wisconsin, though he’s considered local to the Twin Cities. Minnesota author Kate DiCamillo won the Newbery in 2003 for The Tale of Despereaux, and a Newbery Honor for Because of Winn-Dixie in 2001.

I’ve said it before: Minnesota is a very good place to be a reader and a writer.

At Bookforum, Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica and the new story collection Don’t Cry, doesn’t like it when people to label her, or her stories. (Link from Bookslut)