Girl Detective

I wanted to re-read Sarah Vowell’s Wordy Shipmates in the wake of Marilynne Robinson’s passionate defense of Calvinism and Puritanism in The Death of Adam, and Margaret Atwood’s dim view of Puritans, on whom she based the theocracy in her dystopic Handmaid’s Tale. Who was right, Robinson or Atwood? I figured I’d read Vowell and see if her book on the Puritans shed any light on the disagreement. And it did.

Vowell writes in a breezy, funny voice that is all the more interesting given the amount of historical fact and the depth of empathy she brings to her subjects, here the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony after departing England in 1630. She quotes Puritan scholar Perry Miller, one of the Handmaid’s Tale dedicatees, as she details who these people were based on their journals and recorded sermons and more. She is writes mainly of Governor John Winthrop, the author of the phrase “we shall be as a city on a hill,” based on a biblical verse in the book of Matthew, but also of Roger Williams, an early proponent of separation of church and state and the founder of Rhode Island, and Anne Hutchinson, who so exasperated the Massachusetts Bay Puritans that they put her on trial and banished her to Rhode Island.

Vowell quotes original texts and scholarship to present a complicated, engaging, and very human portrait of these historical figures. Reading this helped me determine that Atwood is talking about Plymouth puritans, while Robinson is quoting her own translations of John Calvin’s works, centuries before either of these groups. Are the Puritans good or bad? Robinson says good; Atwood says bad; Vowell says, “it’s complicated.” I’m with Vowell.

I picked up Gingerbread Girl by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover at my local comic shop on a recent Wednesday. I’d enjoyed Coover’s art on Banana Sunday, a book about magical monkeys that my elder, 7yo Drake, also enjoyed. This one is decidedly not for the kiddoes, though.

26yo Annah Billips is a comic-book Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She’s cute, bisexual (so there’s a brooding girl- AND boyfriend), and she thinks she has a lab-grown clone sister of herself named Ginger running around in the world, which may or may not be a psychological coping mechanism she developed as a girl during her parents divorce. The book is narrated by a stream of characters, including the boyfriend, girlfriend, a pigeon (looking awfully similar to Mo Willems’ famous creation) and a bulldog. The art is clever and charming, but the story felt a bit twee. I didn’t care enough about Annah to be invested in whether her missing sister might be real or not. I felt similarly uncharmed about the film 500 Days of Summer, which also has the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, so perhaps that’s what I don’t engage with.

My family recently drove to Ohio and back. Packing well is the key to making it, which includes both packing food and packing for the trip. The last time we took the car, I thought, “Hey, we have the car! Let’s bring the boys’ scooters, and helmets, and…” The car was full, we could never find anything, and I think we forgot several things when we left. This time, I packed sparingly. Five outfits for 9 days for each of us. No wheeled vehicles. I put a couple dozen CDs is a holder, and did the same with DVDs for the player we got for the boys. And the ride went great. Except for traffic around Chicago, which seems to be a level of hell on earth. On the way out, we went 60 miles in 3 hours. Excruciating. We stopped once about every 2 hours, but never for long. I’d packed enough sandwiches and snacks and filled all our refillable water bottles; we didn’t buy any food going out or back. This is good, because when I get hungry and am traveling, my food consciousness goes missing and I think something like, “Mini can of pringles, grape gatorade and snickers ice cream bar. Awesome!” It’s like I’m flashing back one of the few (no, really) times in my feckless youth that I “ate a sandwich.” Apparently when I travel, I get off my local-organic high horse and put her in the stable while I’m away.

Here, in no order, are a few things I learned (or was reminded of)

1. Ask the kids if they need to relieve themselves BEFORE we pass the rest stop. Nothing like passing the sign and thinking, “Heh, we’ll totally make it another 47 miles.” only to hear a voice from the back seat declare otherwise.

2. Traffic around Chicago is just dreadful. I don’t know what savvy people do to avoid it, as we were driving mid day both ways, but I’m going to research it before we do that drive again.

3. Toft’s ice cream is really, really good.

4. Not a lot of people from North Dakota on the road. Way more people from the south and east coast traveling west. Also, stupid license plate frames make some plates hard to see. We had to look up Great Faces, Great Places on my husband’s smart phone.

5. When I get back to writing fiction (which is supposed to be this fall when Guppy starts kindergarten) and if I ever need to make up character names, I need only consult a map or go on a road trip. The exit-name pairings are a goldmine: Constantine Middlebury, Madison and Dane DeForest, Clayton Trotwood, Phillip Greenville, though some, like Brice Reynolds and Kirk Baltimore, sound like they might have a future in adult films. I may have to do a post just on these, which entertained me greatly.

6. I am unable to see signs for Menomonie WI without singing Mahna Mahna.

7. I am unable to see signs for Rockford IL without humming the Rockford Files theme song.

8. Car dvd players are amazing pieces of technology. I can only imagine how much less pleasant the trip would have been without them for the boys. But I’m so glad I listened to a friend’s advice: put off taking them out as long as possible, or even that magic wears thin.

Pretty. Cool. Even if the movie isn’t supposed to be good. I’ll be finding out myself soon enough, I’m sure.

via http://blog.thewisdomofpixar.com/2011/03/cars-2-vintage-world-grand-prix-posters.html

Inspired by the reading lists at The Algonquin Books Blog, (via The Morning News) I am updating my summer reading plan. Remember how I wrote I was going to do a summer reading project, going through Lizzie Skurnick’s book Shelf Discovery, and reading a bunch of the books she mentioned in it?

Yeah, that’s not going to happen. For good reason, though. I continue to read in preparation for the book group I started, on fiction with themes of myth and religion. Our June book was Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (I look forward to the day I no longer have to type that title all the time). It made me want to go back to Love Medicine and read everything she’s written, though I’m not going to right now.

The July book is American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which coincides nicely with its 10th anniversary (will I be able to resist buying the 10th anniversary edition, as I already own a signed HC and a MMPB?) and the recent announcement that it’s getting the HBO treatment. Related reading I hope to do along with American Gods is the sequel, Anansi Boys, and Douglas Adams’ Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, which my husband says is very like it. (Does that mean reading Dirk Gently again?) Possibly also D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths.

The August book is Mrs. Dalloway, and I picked up a copy of The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, so I hope to make it through that. Related reading with be Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I hope.

Right now I’m re-reading Warren Ellis’ Planetary, that ended last year. I didn’t want to read the final issue until I re-read from the beginning, so here I am. I also plan to do this with the crime series 100 Bullets. And I mentioned recently that I’m interested in going back to the beginning of Carla Speed McNeil’s series Finder and re-reading up to the present.

So I’ve got an ambitious reading list, though the only Musts are American Gods and Mrs. Dalloway.

I am trying not to attend to the voice inside my head that says she wants to re-read Game of Thrones. There will be plenty of time for that. If I’m smart, I’ll wait till he finishes the series (no jokes or snarking allowed), see how folks like the ending, then decide whether to give it a go.

What do you hope to read this summer?

After watching Season 1 of Slings and Arrows, it was natural to want to watch a production of Hamlet. We recently watched, and didn’t love, the David Tennant one, which was an unpleasant hybrid of a stage production and a film. We watched Branagh’s completist Hamlet a few years ago. That one bugs me more than a little, as I don’t think the unedited, Frankenstein-ian full text was ever meant to be, or should be, produced in its entirety. And so we settled on, please don’t judge us, the 2000 film with Ethan Hawke. And we really enjoyed it. This modern-media overload version of Hamlet made some interesting choices, and ones that played to the strength of film, rather than just filming a stage-type production. Hawke was fine as Hamlet, as were Gertrude and Claudius. It is a rare production that portrays Gertrude as more than a pawn. I thought Julia Stiles did a fine modern Ophelia, and the casting of Bill Murray as Polonius was interesting, given his comedic past and dramatic present. Most memorable, though, was Liev Schreiber as Laertes. Often Laertes is portrayed simply as a weakling or fool. Not so, here. Schreiber brings a physical presence and palpable sense of menace to the role. Worthwhile if you are a fan of the play, and at less than two hours, a decent expenditure of time.

My husband has become increasingly enamored of local band Cloud Cult, so we snapped up a used copy of the documentary, No One Said It Would Be Easy. It’s charming, but slow and a little meandering at first, rather like the lead singer/songwriter Craig Minowa. But as the documentary continues, and the several band members and associates contribute their memories, art and interpretations, the documentary becomes rather like one of their songs–layered, auditory, visual, weird, beautiful and touching. There is one particularly sad part of the band’s history I won’t spoil here. Another coda to the dvd is that cellist Sara Young and her husband Adrian, their manager, chose to leave the band after the documentary was completed. On screen, theirs was a compelling story, as they talked about and were shown through the process of having two children while playing and touring with the band. It must have been a difficult change, as Sara had been with Craig through all the permutations of the band, yet I’m sure her work/life split will be far more balanced.

If you haven’t heard Cloud Cult before, give them a listen.

For a family film, I took 7yo Drake and 5yo Guppy to see Rio, no relation to the Angry Birds game. We saw it at the Riverview, a discount theater with delicious popcorn topped with real butter, and that was the best part of the experience for me. I was glad not to have paid full price or even standard matinee price. I didn’t feel bad about napping for the last 30 minutes or so of the film. Here’s a good guide to whether you would like the film:

Does the lost bird get found? He can’t fly at the beginning of the movie; can he fly by the end? Do the geeky scientist and awkward librarian fall in love? Do the male and female birds end up together? Does the villain have dark skin? Do the actors who voice the comic relief have dark skin, as opposed to those who voice the central characters?

If you hesitate over any of these questions, then you might not be as bored by Rio as I was. But the boys were delighted, and it was a fine way to spend a rainy afternoon on the cheap.

After the dust settled in the Batman universe last year, I bade farewell to the last superhero titles I was reading. I mostly enjoyed Grant Morrison’s take on Batman et al, but once Batman Incorporated started I lost interest in the reboot.

Then I saw the Batwoman: Elegy graphic novel collection, by Greg Rucka and J. H. Williams III, with an introduction by Rachel Maddow, featuring an ass-kicking redhead. I knew that book was coming home with me. It did not disappoint.

Like her namesake, Batwoman is a vigilante in a mask with a secret identity: Kate Kane, a former West Point cadet. We are soon shown she’s a lesbian (the most prominent gay character in the DC universe), which matters in her personal life. Behind the mask, though, she seeks to confront a new villain coming to town who will be head of Gotham City’s many covens.

The contrasts of personal and private life, painted and penciled art, plus easy-access introduction to a new, compelling character and villain made this a fast, enjoyable read, and a welcome return for me to the DC universe.

I’m reading about Louise Erdrich as I prepare to discuss The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse tomorrow. In an interview she did with Bill Moyers, she includes this piece she wrote to herself as an encouragement to keep writing:

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew in a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls under the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzle
or the doll’s tiny shoes, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic.
Go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementoes.
Don’t sort the paperclips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience.

A Canadian television series now available on DVD, Slings and Arrows was recommended at Mental Multivitamin. My thoughtful husband got it for me immediately, and then (as so often happens) it languished on our shelf, gathering dust.

(Oh, my, has it really be over THREE YEARS since that recommendation, and likely that long it’s been on the shelf?)

Last week we pulled it out, and went through the first season’s 6 episodes in quick succession. It’s about a Shakespeare festival theater in Canada, its struggles to make survive and put on a credible version of Hamlet. Oliver is the fussy director, Ellen is the aging actress, Geoffrey is the former-star-who-had-a-famous-breakdown, and Rachel McAdams plays a likable ingenue. It’s mostly funny, with some tragedy and romance thrown in for good measure. The cast is enormously engaging, as is the play within the show. I look forward to Season 2, which I’m waiting for from the library.

I am very, very sorry. How is it, why is it, I’ve never written here about Carla Speed McNeil’s comic-book series Finder? There is no other series I’ve been reading as long as I’ve been reading Finder, which is since the beginning, about 15 years. But I’ve never yet written about it, probably because up until “Voice” I’ve purchased single issues and not read them in graphic-novel collections. But now they’re being collected by Dark Horse Press, and they’re in pretty shiny packages with tons of explanatory notes at the end. So I picked up Voice and am writing about Finder for the first time. And for that, I apologize. Because if you like comics, and you like speculative fiction, then perhaps you, like me, will LOVE Finder, which the author described as “aboriginal science fiction.”

Finder refers to Jaeger, a mystery man, who is introduced at the beginning of the series in the storyline “Sin Eater.” He’s living with Emma Grosvesnor and her three daughters. Subsequent stories follow Jaeger, the Grosvenors, or other characters in this rich, fantastic world. In “Voice,” we follow the eldest Grosvenor daughter, Rachel, as she goes through the “conformation competition” for her clan. This is a coming of age novel as we follow a character who starts off light and shallow. When she is mugged and a necessary heirloom is stolen, she had to delve deep, into her world, looking for Jaeger, and into herself, to figure out what to do next.

McNeil has distinct, accessible, manga-influenced art, and her characters are engaging. Rachel’s internal and external journeys had me enthralled. I devoured this book in fewer than 24 hours. Additionally, I plan to buy the stories in their new collected forms and re-read from the beginning. This fills me with a great deal of geek joy.

From “Get Over ‘Ferris Bueller,’ Everyone” at The Atlantic:

I grew up in a place not unlike Ferris’s tony North Shore suburb. Naturally, I dreamed about cutting class and zipping around Chicago in a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. I’m just not sure every kid shared, or even had the means to share, my fantasy. This is the myth of Ferris Bueller. It’s portrayed as a universal story, when it’s really not.

I’m a fan of the late John Hughes, but Alan Siegel makes some strong points about why this movie should be more troubling than revered.

Via The Morning News

I requested Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self months ago from the public library and my turn in rotation finally came up. It’s a short, small book containing essays based on a series of lectures she gave at Yale University. In them, she covers some of the same ground as she did in her previous collection of essays The Death of Adam, such as the faulty facts deployed by those who denounce religion in the face of what she calls “parascience.” I savored and was challenged by The Death of Adam, but did not have a similar experience with the four essays in Absence of Mind.

“On Human Nature” argues that “the mind as felt experience had been excluded from important fields of modern thought.” In “The Strange History of Altruism,” she questions the recent spate of articles supporting social Darwinism that humans are selfish creatures, altruistic only to those who do (or might) share genes. “The Freudian Self” details some of the reductive understanding by and about Freud of the relation between people and sexuality. And “Thinking Again” notes that those who argue against religion in the name of science talk about research as if it’s complete, finished, and finite. (See, for example the title alone of Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.)

While her points are well taken, I enjoyed them more in The Death of Adam. Here, they were weighed down with what I think of as ivory-tower jargon, including one of my least favorite terms (I find it needlessly esoteric, and thus alienating), hermeneutics, i.e., the study of texts.

If there is an agenda behind the implicit and explicit polemic against religion, which is now treated as brave and new, now justified by Wahhabism and occasional eruptions of creationist zeal, but is fully present in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, it may well be that it creates rhetorical occasions for asserting an anthrolopology of modern humanity, a hermenuteutics of condescension.

The essays didn’t feel accessible or engaging to me, though this could certainly be due to faults in my own understanding or attention. My dislike of this book disappoints me, as I’ve appreciated and enjoyed Robinson’s novels as well as The Death of Adam. While I appreciate her arguments against facile proofs and reductive science, they are couched in such difficult, dry prose I struggled to wade through this slim volume.

With Rose Red, I’m on the fifteenth volume of Fables? I don’t know that I’ve ever read a comic series as long as I’ve been reading and enjoying this one. The comic book series posits a world in which storybook characters, like Snow White and Rose Red, are real and live secretly among us “mundies.” In this volume, the Fables continue to be pursued by the scary Dark Man as the witch Frau Totenkinder prepares to battle him. Additionally, Rose Red FINALLY gets over her depression about the departure of Little Boy Blue, and gets her butt out of bed to take back control of the Farm, where the non-human Fables, like Reynard the Fox and the Three Little Pigs, live. We get history of Rose Red and her sister Snow White, as well as a new mystery or two. There’s lots of extra material collected from the 100th issue. For fans of the series, this is another strong entry. For those who haven’t tried it, go to the library or comic shop and check out volume 1. There’s a lot here to like.

For others who have read this, though, I have a question: did we ever find out Totenkinder’s secret?

The third graphic-novel collection of DC’s Vertigo series Unwritten v. 3: Dead Man’s Knock by written by Mike Carey and illustrated by Peter Gross, continues the adventures of Tom Taylor, whose father’s books about a Harry Potter-ish boy named “Tommy Taylor” have brought him more trouble than he’d imagined possible. Accused of murder, believed dead, and on the run from a mysterious, story-obsessed cabal, Tom is accompanied by a reporter and a woman named Lizzie Hexam. In this volume we learn more about the cabal, and Tom’s father and mother. One chapter was a (too?) self-consciously clever choose-your-own-adventure tale about Lizzie’s past. This is heady stuff on the magic of stories and their influence. If you’re a fan of stories about stories, like the comic-book series Fables and Sandman, or Jasper Fforde’s novels, I think you’ll like this series. My only complaint is that I have to wait another six months or so for the next collection. I’m hoping all this mystery will eventually pay off, but for now, I’m hooked.

Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse centers on Father Damien Modeste, a Catholic priest to an Ojibwe territory, and Sister Leopolda, a nun who may have been a saint. These two characters anchor a story with dozens of supporting characters. I was thankful for the family tree at the beginning of the book, and referred to it many times.

His hand, long and crooked, beautifully worn and supple, oval nails of opaque tortoise, surprised him on the stem of the glass. For a long time he had been old, then he was past old. A living mummy. Of all people to have become so ancient! Himself! He put his hand to his hair, just wisps of thin and brittle stuff parted by the white scrawl of the scar that unwrote so many of his early memories. And the heart in his chest, so touchy, so tremulous. Easy things had become difficult. For instance, children. He had always loved to be around them, but now their exuberance was rattling. Their voices and quick movements dizzied him. He had to sit, allow his heart to settle, and restore his strength. And his hearing had become quite tricky–sometimes he heard everything, the undertones in Chopin’s preludes, which he still played, though with a fumbling energy, the rustle of his own bedsheets, and at other times all sounds were cloaked by the roar of an unseen ocean. (4, 5)

Erdrich starts near the end of Damien’s life, then takes the reader back to his complicated beginnings. Damien’s history is interwoven with letters he has written to the Pope(s) over the decades. When a representative from the Vatican finally arrives, it is to investigate miracles supposedly performed by the late Sister Leopolda, who holds a prominant place in Father Damien’s memory and history.

The interplays between things are what made the book both dizzying and dazzling for me: Damien and Leopolda, good and evil, Ojibwe and Catholic, male and female, real and mythic. The panoply of supporting characters, in contrast to Damien and Leopolda, appeared and disappeared in ways that felt strangely brief to me, given the rich characterizations of the central figures. In looking over descriptions of the prolific Erdrich’s other works, though, LRotMaLNH is situated in the same fictional territory and peopled with many of the same characters as several of her other books. Erdrich has lovely, evocative prose, and thoughtful, provocative characters. I’ve read a few of her books, but feel I might want to go back to the beginning now and read them all.

Continuing with the onslaught of movies from the library.

The Secret in their Eyes (2009) A Spanish-language film that won the Oscar for best foreign film. I liked it; my husband G. Grod loved it. A retired legal guy is writing a novel based on a case from early in his career. The story is told back and forth in the past and present, but is still clear in the tales it tells. Warning, this movie starts off with images of sexual violence and the plot moves around that, so if that’s not your thing, avoid this. But it has good performances and a compelling plot, as well as an amazingly suspenseful elevator ride scene. Very good.

500 Days of Summer (2010) The relationship of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, the Summer of the title, is tracked over 500 days, going back and forth, sometimes overlapping. Rather than funny and clever, I found it cloying and unsurprising. I like both the leads, but the flat characters killed any charm the gimmick of back and forth in time might have brought me. A few funny bits, but overall, eminently skippable.

The Town (2010) Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, this Boston heist movie is solid. It’s anchored by good performances from Affleck, Jeremy Renner and Jon Hamm, the plot is fine, and though it covers ground many have been over before (one last heist, the good guy trying to get out while his sidekick gets more embroiled, the guy falling in love with the only witness, etc.) it does so in a way that was enjoyable, even if not surprising. Definitely worth renting.

Added later: My husband G. noted that The Town is essentially the same story as Good Will Hunting: smart local struggles to get out of stifling situation, meets higher class girl, feels dragged down by old local friends.

A friend of my husband, G. Grod, is moving soon. He offered his collection of vintage Star Wars toys to our boys, 5yo Guppy and 7yo Drake. (And 39yo G.) We, of course, accepted this stunningly generous offer with alacrity. The boys have been playing with them for the last few weeks in great delight.

A few weeks ago, in the shadow of some writing deadline, I yelled at the rambunctious boys to go play outside.

“Sure,” responded Drake, instead of his usual begging for television. “We’ll take the Star Wars toys outside.”

No alarm bells went off in my head; I was awash in relief. The boys went to the back steps. I left them playing happily there until it came time to leave for Guppy’s tumbling class. Drake was especially excited to go, as I was going to let him play with the gameboy.

I went out the back door and found the boys in the back yard, not on the back steps.

“Time to go!” I said.

“We lost the toys,” they said.

I looked around our backyard, covered with high grass and higher weeds. I stifled the urge to scream.

“Get down from there and start looking.” I said. “We’re not going to tumbling unless you find them.”

We found eight with relative ease. Walking slowly we (and by this, I mean mostly me) found four more. Only two remained at large, a snow trooper and Yoda.

The time for tumbling class had come and gone. Guppy took it in stride. His older brother, deprived of a planned-for video session, had a meltdown, which I ignored. My husband arrived home from work. I put him in charge of the search party and left for a movie. When I returned home, G said they’d found the snow trooper in the rhubarb. I had figured the snow trooper was going to be easier to spot than Master Yoda, who is green, dressed in brown, and small.

Sure enough, Yoda eluded our efforts to find him. The next day we looked, and I said a prayer to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Do you know it? It goes like this:

Tony, Tony, look around
Yoda’s lost and must be found.
Please help us find Yoda.

(Insert lost item instead of Yoda; you get the idea.) But we did not find Yoda. I looked. The kids looked. G looked. Days passed.

Then came a very windy day. The latch on our back storm door was broken, so the wind kept blowing it open and slamming it shut. I heard glass break, looked out our back door, but didn’t see anything broken. I thought the storm door panels were made of plexiglass. But one had been glass, as I found out when G. next used the back door and found the glass on our back steps and in the nearby flower bed.

When I went out the next day to pick up the glass, I cherished a small hope of finding Yoda. I’d be working in the area Guppy said he’d last been seen. I looked from above; no Yoda. I bent at the waist; no Yoda. Only when I crouched down, picking up the smallest pieces, did I finally see him. Master Yoda, lying face up, patiently waiting to be found.

Here’s the close up of where he was. Looks obvious, right?

But what about medium distance? Is he still easy to find?

And now, what about from regular height? Can you find him now? (Hint, he’s a little right of center.)

We rinsed him off and returned him to his carrying case. Then I said thank you to St. Anthony, though I thought breaking our storm window was a little extreme, and decreed that from that day forth, the Star Wars toys were INDOOR toys.

A few times, I’ve picked a longer, less-illustrated book to read to 5yo Guppy and 7yo Drake at bedtime. Last year, I found a new copy of The Mouse and His Child written by Russell Hoban and illustrated by Caldecott artist David Small in a re-issued edition. I remembered reading it as a girl, and that I liked it, but nothing beyond that.

A wind-up mouse and child are displayed in a toy store at Christmastime.

As the tramp watched, the saleslady opened a box and took out two toy mice, a large one and a small one, who stood upright with outstretched arms and joined hands. They wore blue velveteen trousers and patent leather shoes, and they had glass-bead eyes, white thread whiskers, and black rubber tails. When the saleslady wound the key in the mouse father’s back he danced in a circle, swinging his little son up off the counter and down again while the children laughed and reached out to touch them. Around and around they danced gravely, and more and more slowly as the spring unwound, until the mouse father came to a stop holding the child high in his upraised arms. (2, 3)

They are purchased and taken out into the world, where many strange, wondrous, sad and happy things befall them. This is an often dark book that wanders sometimes in parts that weren’t of interested to me or the boys; visits with a muskrat and a snapping turtle went on too long for us. Yet the story moves along as the two windups are pursued by the villain Manny Rat. Often when I’d stop reading, 5yo Guppy would be able to say what had happened, or what he thought was going to happen. I figured if he was keeping up, I’d keep going. Both he and Drake said they wanted to hear the story, and in spite of its darkness and sad parts, both boys always said they wanted me to continue reading. They were much more engaged on pages with the lovely black and white illustrations.

I was reminded very much of Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Those who find that book too dark and scary, either for themselves or children, would likely not enjoy this book. Conversely, if you liked the complex, mythical tale of Edward, then I think you’ll appreciate this. This is an especially good tale of a devoted father and created families.

From “Food Crazy” by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl at Experience Life:

when Ancel Keys analyzed his study subjects, he concluded that these effects were simply that of human physiology: If you feed someone 1,500 calories a day, his mental health will be jeopardized; he’ll exhibit strange, obsessive behaviors; and he’ll end up fatter than he was before he started. It’s just science.

We all know the right things to do: make better food choices (eat more whole, unprocessed foods), exercise more and sit less. Simple, but NOT easy for this coffee/carb/writer gal.

The American was my husband G. Grod’s pick and he enjoyed it more than I did. George Clooney is an assassin hiding out, doing ONE LAST JOB BEFORE HE GETS OUT, providing a custom made gun to a FEMME FATALE. Even after his last “friend” died violently (at his hand!) he begins to FALL IN LOVE WITH A BEAUTIFUL HOOKER WITH A HEART OF GOLD. This bag of cliches weighed on me.

The film is beautifully shot in Italy, and Clooney gives a good performance as a quiet, terse, tired killer plagued by rightful paranoia. But the plot is thin, and full of holes: he ditches a cell phone so he can’t be traced, but keeps the car he was given. One of the people out to kill him has ample opportunity a few times, which makes the ending less tense. A person who’s supposed to be ambiguous wasn’t, really, to me. I was really bothered by the plot with the prostitute. Not without merit, but I wish I’d done something else with my hour and forty-five minutes.

Reviews from: A.O. Scott, Ebert, Michael Phillips, Rotten Tomatoes.