Girl Detective

My younger son, 5yo Guppy, has recently become enamored of baby loons. He saw a picture of a baby taking a ride on its mama’s back in a book and hasn’t stopped talking about them since. So when I saw Loon Baby, written by Molly Beth Griffin and illustrated by Anne Hunter, on display at Magers & Quinn, I showed it to him and asked if he’d like me to get it for him. I had trouble prying it away from him so the bookseller could ring it up. We read it at bedtime, and he took it to bed with him. You can see the result, above.

Loon Baby is a sweet story about a mother loon and her baby out on the lake. The mother goes for food, but the baby is too small to dive, so can’t go with her. When she is gone a long time, he worries, then becomes lost. Only when he begins to cry is his mother able to find him and they return home to their warm nest on the lake.

I’m a Minnesotan now, so the setting of a north woods lake fills me with longing for a trip to the shore. The text doesn’t rhyme, but has distinct rhythms that make it a pleasure to read aloud.

Loon Baby waited
and floated
and paddled in circles.
The breeze ruffled his fluff.

The art, a combination of watercolors and ink, is beautifully colored and crosshatched for texture. The baby loon is nothing short of adorable. Or, as Guppy says, “CUUUUUTE!”

It does, however, bear more than passing similarities to other missing-mother-bird stories, especially Come Along, Daisy and Owl Babies, two long-time favorites in our family. The family bookshelf has more than enough room for ones as charmingly told and illustrated as Loon Baby. But could we have a move away from the absent-mother-and-worried/lost-child motif, please?

I went into Green Zone with middling expectations, and left feeling like I’d watched a good, but not great film. This effort by director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon has nowhere near the brains and energy of the Bourne trilogy, which I love. An Army soldier becomes disillusioned when he and his team can’t find the WMDs their bosses tell them are there. He works with a reporter and a CIA (Brendan Gleeson, whose American accent is too thin for the role) and against a duplicitous goverment official. While the story moves among groups of people, including the Iraqis, it never quite manages to be as complex as I wished it were, though that might have been sacrificed for the clarity of the story. An overlong and oddly not-intense firefight at the end didn’t help. Politically conservative viewers, and supporters of the war in Iraq, should not watch this. But I’m not sure those who questioned the war effort are the ideal audience, either, since that would be like preaching to the converted. It did make me want to re-watch Black Hawk Down.

(Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine)

Carson is a professor of Greek, and this “book” is her tribute to her brother, who died after being absent from her life over twenty years. It is not so much a book, but rather a book-shaped object, with a long, folded single sheet of paper inside a cardboard box. The text begins with a poem in Greek, and proceeds to define the words, one at a time, on the left-facing pages, while the right-facing pages contain her memories, photos and letters of her brother. The definitions of the Greek words, or “entries” as Carson at one point emphasizes, seem straightforward at first, but soon it becomes clear that Carson has insinuated herself into them. The sentences used as examples tend to intertwine with the fragments about her brother, and most include a reference to “nox” or “night,” in one meaning. Eventually the poem as a whole is translated, and her memories unfold to include meeting her brother’s widow and attending his funeral.

After finishing, I felt more like I didn’t understand the work than that I didn’t “like” it. I’ve put “like” in quotations, because it’s an unfitting and inadequate word for the response a complicated, ambitious, beautiful work like this deserves. How much richer it must be for Carson to have the scroll this is a copy of as a memoriam to her brother, rather than an urn of ashes. But while I was sometimes moved while I read, or took in, the work, it didn’t stir me deeply as I felt it “should.” This, however, might be a failing in myself, either of understanding, or of empathy. I have not experienced anything near the loss and sorrow described here, and as one reviewer quoted Iris Murdoch as writing, “The bereaved cannot speak to the unbereaved.” I felt similarly distanced during my reading of Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking. Whether it’s a want of feeling in me, or an intellectual distancing by these women, I can’t say.

Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky is a dark, weird little book. It’s deliberately weird, though, so don’t expect realism. It’s also not a chaste story. There’s drunkenness, promiscuity, and a variety of bad behavior, as the title indicates. Coincidences and bizarre twists of fortune serve to highlight the bad, and sometimes good, behavior of Marie and those around her.

Sometimes, Marie got a little drunk at work.

She took care of Caitlin, the precocious two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of her friend Ellen Kendall. It was a full-time job. Marie got paid in cash and was given a room in the basement.

She never drank in the daytime. Only at night. Marie didn’t see the harm: a little whiskey, a little chocolate. Marie liked to watch bad movies on TV while Caitlin slept. She liked wandering over to the fully stocked refrigerator and hel;ing herself to whatever she wanted to deat. Marie constant marveled over the food: French cheeses, leftover steak, fresh-squeezed orange juice, raspberries imported from Portugal. It had only been three weeks since Marie’s thirtieth birthday, the day that she had gotten out of jail.

The situation would have been humiliating had Marie any ambition in life. Fortunately, Marie was not in any way ambitious.

Stylized and over the top, it reminded me more than a little of Linda Fiorentino’s femme fatale in The Last Seduction. Like that character, Marie is the star of her own story, not merely the accessory to those who are hurt by her. And as the book unfolds, I couldn’t help but wonder: didn’t some of them deserve what happened to them, at least a little? It’s a nervy book that seems to encourage the reader to be unsympathetic with its messed-up main character, while sneakily making it impossible not to root for her. A darkly fun, fast read. It fell in the first round of the year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, but I’m happy I got the chance to enjoy it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is non-fiction, but reads like a novel. Science writer Rebecca Skloot has taken years of her life to gather details on a black woman from Baltimore who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Henrietta Lacks was treated by doctors in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins. As standard procedure, they took a sample of the cancer on her cervix, which proved to be the first human tissue sample that, given the right conditions, grew and kept growing. Henrietta died soon after, but her cells are alive across the planet today, used in medical research. Her family, though, didn’t know this until a reporter from Rolling Stone talked to them in the 1970s.

Skloot moves back and forth in time and in different people’s lives. She painstakingly recreates what can be known about the life of Henrietta, and the history of her cells. More than Henrietta, though, Skloot tells the story of Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter who has no memory of her mother, and cries out throughout her life for the lack of one. She and “Miss Rebecca” navigate a rocky relationship as they both seek to discover more about Henrietta, and her “immortal” cells. The question Deborah asks, that the reader can’t help but wonder also, is how Henrietta’s cells can be the worldwide basis, for cellular research, yet her descendants can’t afford healthcare? As Deborah said, in one of the passages Skloot quotes:

Truth be told, I can’t get made at science, because it help people live, and I’d be a mess without it. I’m a walking drugstore! [Deborah has many prescription drugs for a variety of difficulties.] I can’t say nuthin bad about science, but I won’t lie, I would like some health insurance so I don’t got to pay all that money every month for drugs my mother cells probably helped make.

I was by turns fascinated and horrified by this book, with its straightforward explanation of cellular science alongside the painful history of the Lacks family and their struggles. There’s much to mull over after reading this book, most of all how racism and profit are alive and thriving in the present, no matter how comfortable it might be to think otherwise.

(because it’s only technically spring, here.) First, determine the outside temperature. This system of layering will be too warm for above 20F, but below that should stand you in good stead.

Next, remember what your mother said: use the toilet. As an eyeglass wearer, I start by putting in my contacts so I don’t fog up every time I go in and out of warmth. I also apply moisturizer to my face, neck and lips. During the winter, I forego sunscreen to maximize what little vitamin D I can get from the sun.

In order, don:

1. Underwear (underpants, and bra if you wear one)
2. Undershirt (thermal or silk, longer length is best)
3. Longjohns (thermal or silk). Pull waistband over bottom of undershirt. This will keep your lower back (or overbutt, as my 7yo calls it) from unwanted exposure.
4. Socks, long and thick. Pull tops over bottoms of longjohns.
5. Shirt(s)
6. Pants, over bottom of shirt. Do NOT tuck overshirt into longjohns.
7. Sweater
8. Snowpants
9. Boots, hat and scarf
10. Gloves/mittens. Gloves inside mittens is the warmest, but diminishes dexterity.
11. Coat. The lower the temp, the puffier and longer it should be, covering at least your butt and the top of your thighs.

This order of operations has you always pulling something over a previous layer, rather than tucking in a subsequent layer, which makes for a smoother line and means you don’t have to double back, for example if you accidentally put boots on before snow pants. Also check out Sal’s post at Already Pretty on Layering Without Lumps.

Stay warm. And remember, it’s only two more months until the frost date.

Hat tip to Bread and Jam for Frances.

Every time I sign in to my weblog, I have oodles of spam; the Wordpress filters seem particularly inept of late.

7yo Drake, who is looking over my shoulder, (watch what she types, Guppy!), added:

What a piece of work is spam.

!!! My seven year old is making puns on Hamlet. I’m so proud I could burst.

This is actually not (so much) a post to gripe about it, but instead to say thanks to longtime commenters and now friends (virtual or otherwise and not in a particular order): Amy R, Kate F, Weirleader, Steph, Carolyn, Vince, Sarah, Thalia, Jessica, my aunt, my father in law, MFS, Susan P, Inquirer, Camille, and others who I can’t go on to name since I have a boy at each elbow and am no longer at leisure. Many thanks for your ongoing conversations. While this blog is my attempt to practice regular writing, it’s made much more enjoyable and challenging by the discussions and perspectives you bring!

Over at this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, there was much gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands when Jennifer Egan’s Visit from the Goon Squad (one of my favorite books of last year) defeated Skippy Dies in the first round. In the comments of the previous day’s bout, a reader noted something called “silver medal syndrome,” in which the gold medal winner was a compromise that people could agree upon, where the silver winner was one that some loved passionately and others argued against. Thus the passion-inspiring runner-up is usually a better bet for greatness. I thought this made a lot of sense, and reminded me of the descriptions from this article on the history of choosing the Booker prize winner. I was reminded again when I read Chris Nashawatny’s piece in Entertainment Weekly on “The Most Overrated Best Picture Winners Ever,” which is not available online.

Here were some of the upsets: High Noon was edged out by The Greatest Show on Earth. (I recently watched High Noon, and can attest to its quality.) Giant was passed by for Around the World in 80 Days. Oliver! won in a year that 2001 and Rosemary’s Baby weren’t even nominated. Ordinary People trumped Raging Bull and Scorcese got burned again when Dances with Wolves won against Goodfellas. Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction. English Patient trounced Fargo. American Beauty won in 1999, a year packed with great films like Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Magnolia, Boys Don’t Cry and Election. Crash beat Brokeback. I’d add that Hurt Locker beat Inglourious Basterds and this year The King’s Speech won out over Inception and The Social Network.

I’m sure Nashawatny’s critiques rubbed some people the wrong way, but there’s not an example here of a winner I’d rather see than any of the “losers”. In several cases, I think the loser has showed its merit by becoming a classic (e.g., High Noon) while the winner has faded into (deserved?) obscurity. What this means, though? So many more books and movies to check out, like Skippy Dies. I’d groan, but it’s a lovely problem to have.

My friend Queenie was the one whose fierce love of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster–both “>the television series and the stories–finally made me take notice. For that, and many other things, I’m very grateful. I started with the series, which stars Hugh Laurie as vapid, funny Bertie Wooster, a role that might surprise people who only know him from House, but is a perfect fit for those of us who saw him in Blackadder. Stephen Fry is pitch perfect–droll and dry–as Jeeves.

This is one of those lovely instances in which the television and book versions are both wonderful, each in a way unique to its medium. When I finally cracked open Life with Jeeves, a good place to start, I discovered perfect gems that were funny, sweet, cheering and charming.

The first of the telegrams arrived shortly after noon, and Jeeves brought it in with the before-luncheon snifter. It was from my Aunt Dahlia, operating from Market Snodsbury, a small town of sorts a mile or two along the main road as you leave her country seat.

It ran as follows:

Come at once. Travers

And when I say it puzzled me like the dickens, I am understating it, if anything. As mysterious a communication, I considered, as was ever flashed over the wires. I studied it in a profound reverie for the best part of two dry Martinis and a dividend. I read it backwards. I read it forwards. As a matter of fact, I have a sort of recollection of even smelling it. But it still baffled me. (386)

The Jeeves and Wooster stories were a perfect balance to some of the darker books I was reading. The short stories especially were easy and quick to consume, though rather like Chinese food: a little while later I can’t remember the specifics, and only know I’m hungry again.

I got tripped up by reading the first two segments in this omnibus, the story collections The Inimitable Jeeves and Very Good, Jeeves. After my recent reading of The Road, and before I embarked on any number of other books clamoring for my attention, I thought I’d indulge in a Jeeves story. Alas, the last segment of the book is the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, and I didn’t realize it till I was a few chapters in. Knowing what a hard time I have remembering certain specifics from the stories, I knew I shouldn’t abandon it midway. Fortunately, it was a delight and a breeze to finish this particular novel, in which Bertie thinks Jeeves has lost his skill at schemes, and instead tries to help out his Aunt Dahlia and his friends Gussie Fink-Nottle and Tuppy Glossop. Hilarious disaster ensues.

Funny, and especially terrific if you’re in want of something to lift the spirits.

I am not an efficient or effective purger. My husband is actively opposed to purging. And since the birth of now 5yo Guppy, our house has gone into a slow, steady decline in neatness and cleanliness. I’ve vowed to clean and organize before; my organization tab on this blog is from 2007 (*wince*).

This time, I think I really mean it. I have two cleared horizontal surfaces to show for it. Fingers crossed that I can keep this up.

The magazine table, before (covered with things to donate):

Magazine table, after:

Entry table, with five years of accumulated non-urgent mail (keep in mind, none of this is quite junk, either; I’m on the DMA’s do-not mail list plus recycle anything that’s obvious. This is all the non-obvious stuff, mostly financial statements):

Entry table, after:

Two of my favorite books to read to my sons are about eggs. One is a classic, Bread and Jam for Frances:

It was breakfast time,
and everyone was at the table.
Father was eating his egg.
Mother was eating her egg.
Gloria was sitting in a high chair and eating her egg, too.
Frances was eating bread and jam.
“What a lovely egg!” said Father.

Frances the badger does not like eggs, or most other foods. She asks for bread and jam instead. But when she begins to receive bread and jam at every meal, Frances learns the perils of getting what you want. This book has so many things: charming pictures by Lillian Hoban, an amusing, yet gently instructive tale by her then-husband Russell Hoban, several songs about jam, and (as Kate Moses pointed out in her touching memoir Cakewalk) a story about food and its role in a happy family. My mom read this to us when my sisters and I were girls, and she made up tunes to go to the songs, just as I’ve done for my sons.

The second book was given to us by my sister Ruthie some years ago. It’s the deceptively simple Two Eggs, Please written by Sarah Weeks and illustrated by Doreen Cronin, the illustrator of the Click, Clack Moo books. It’s 2 a.m. in a downtown diner. A brown bear is in the kitchen, a red fox is out front. One by one, customers trickle in; they include a taxi-driving rhino, an upright-bass playing mouse whose band has probably just finished a set when the bar closed, a construction worker ram, and a homeless alligator and his pet snake. What do they all want? Two eggs, please. (And the “please” is pleasingly repeated.) They each get a nice, big cup of coffee but the egg orders are all different. The chef is shown breaking two eggs, one brown, one white, and both the same on the inside. The simple, timeless message told with charming pictures and few words moves me every time, and I only hope its deeper message is planted and growing inside my boys, even as they enjoy the simplistic portrayal of a late night diner counter.

I eat the same breakfast every morning: a cherry pomegranate toaster pastry and a cappuccino. About two hours later, I’m finally hungry for something more substantial, and that’s when I usually cook an egg. As often as we can, we get our eggs from one of Guppy’s preschool teachers, whose grandmother keeps chickens out in the country. Check out this yolk: half as high as a golf ball, and yellow-orange like a hot sun. These are eggs from happy chickens.

And from another recent morning, one of Guppy’s and my favorite second breakfasts: a bacon/cheese scramble alongside toast with a great deal of butter (hat tip, Mercy Watson books):

Note that I’m eating the heels of the bread, as the three other people in this family refuse to. Am I eating their leavings, or fortifying myself with the part of the bread that has the most nutrients?

Night Train to Munich, a lesser-known film by Carol Reed, director of The Third Man, owes a lot to its predecessor, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, with which it shares screenwriters, lead actress and supporting actors. It does, however, hold its own in a lovely new Criterion edition. It was both filmed and set in the very beginning of World War II, which is one of the reasons many of the Nazis are portrayed as fools rather than evil, as the extent of their actions wasn’t yet known.

Margaret Lockwood is the daughter of a scientist whose new method of armour-plating vehicles might be critical in the war. Both the Nazis and the English are trying to secure the scientist to their side with secret agents and complicated plans. Paul von Hernried (who would soon leave, before he was arrested, for Hollywood to become better known as Paul Henried in Casablanca) meets the daughter in a concentration camp. Twenty minutes in she meets co-star Rex Harrison, a seaside song and dance man, and their roles entwine engagingly for the rest of the film. Entertaining and worth watching, this is a beautiful print, and the Criterion dvd comes with a good history and essay on the film.

This was my second read of Cormac McCarthy’s multiple award winner The Road, this month’s pick for the reading group I’ve started, of books with themes of myth and religion. Again, I found The Road a profound, moving, provocative story of the environment and human nature, told with Christian allegory. I flinched at times. At others I couldn’t stop reading until I found out what happened to the unnamed man and his son. And in the end I cried, then dried my tears and read through till the end, which some see as hopeful and others (like my husband, G. Grod) do not.

Yes, it was made into a movie, with Viggo Mortenson. It didn’t get great reviews; I don’t plan to see it. As for the book, though, there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t yet read the book, I recommend it. Read it and come back to discuss.

A man and his young son are on the road, heading south several years after an unspecified environmental disaster:

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire. (6)

That last phrase, “each the other’s world entire” continues to awe me with how much power five words can carry. McCarthy subtly creates the near future and its slight off-ness. He doesn’t use apostrophes for the word not: didnt, wouldnt, cant. Yet he does use it for other contractions: we’re, they’re, there’s. He’ll occasionally tweak a word, as when the man uses the binoculars to “glass” the road below, to create a feeling of difference.

The first time I read the novel, I was convinced there had been a nuclear holocaust. This time, noting the references to the distant sun, I suspect a natural disaster, something like the meteor some scientists theorize brought in the Ice Age and the end of the dinosaurs.

The man and his son stumble through a ruined landscape, scavenging for canned food and fuel from the past. This raises the question of hope versus futility. If hope, then is it a good thing, or was there a reason it was what remained in the box Pandora opened? Is hope an evil, like the rest of what escaped, or is it the antidote?

I choose to believe in hope. That’s what I read into the book, though I see how McCarthy skillfully left readers to draw their own conclusions in many instances, especially the end.

Unintentionally, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, my husband and I seem to be on an 80’s-comedy bender. The past month included 3 birthdays, three work-intensive birthday cakes, one family visit, and four cases of strep (one for each of us.) So at the end of each day, just about all I want to do it collapse on the couch and be entertained. And Groundhog Day was ideal for that.

Bill Murray is Phil, a bitter weatherman on the embarrassing-to-him trip to Punxatawney, PA to cover the emergence of the groundhog, also Phil. His nastiness projects him into a type of purgatory, in which he wakes every morning to the same February 2nd.

I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters.
*That* was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get *that* day over, and over, and over…

He goes through the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grief, along with detours into crime and hedonism, but has a lot to learn on his way to the end of the movie, which is apparently a favorite of both Buddhists and Catholics.

The success of this film, as it nears its 20th anniversary, is likely due both to the charm of Murray being funny combined with a sweet tale that doesn’t become saccharine or even preachy, and in the end is far more thoughtful and full of ideas to ponder than I would have expected from the team who did Stripes and Ghostbusters. Both of which are good, but Groundhog Day, in my estimation, is a classic.

Earlier this year, Moviefone had a new evaluation of how long Bill Murray was stuck in the Groundhog Day loop.

All of us have strep throat this week, so there’s been more comfort TV than usual. My husband and I followed the recent viewing of 16 Candles with Weird Science, John Hughes’ teen-boy wish-fulfillment movie, in which two geeks build a dream woman. This movie could easily have been hateful. Instead, it’s merely (surprisingly) not that offensive, thanks to the geeks’ believability, Kelly LeBrock’s knowledge and power, and a lack of actual sex. Intermittently entertaining for some funny lines, and interesting to see Robert Downey Jr with a sky-high gelled coif, but eminently skippable. This is from IMDB’s trivia:

Although he wrote the screenplay, John Hughes was not overly invested in it and was adamant about not directing the film. He changed his mind when Universal offered him a deal: if said yes to directing Weird Science, they would greenlight a project Hughes cared much more deeply about AND wanted to direct: The Breakfast Club (1985). Hughes would later state that he was irritated by the time he had to take away from the latter film to work on this one.

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question is also one of the selections for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. What I remember most about the announcement of it’s winning the MB prize was that both the author and many others seemed surprised that it won. After reading this expose, “Tears, Tiffs and Triumphs“, about the judging process of the Booker over the years, I figure the judging is just slightly more than random, but usually a MB prize winner doesn’t suck. And The Finkler Question doesn’t.

The back of the book describes it as “a funny, furious, unflinching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. The first adjective is “funny” and many of the blurbs praised its humor, wit and satire, yet the book is much more concerned with the endless complications of anti-Semitism and Israeli/Palestinian violence. There really is nothing funny about the latter, but Jacobson often does find humor in the former, as in the main character Julian Treslove’s weird fixation on the Judaism of his friends:

Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew–small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes. He had extravagant features, a prominent jaw, long arms and big feet for which he had trouble finding wide enough shoes, even at fifteen. (Treslove noticed feet; his were dainty like a dancer’s.) What is more–and everything was more on Finkler–he had a towering manner that made him look taller than he actually was, and delivered verdicts on people and events with such assurance that he almost spat them out of his mouth. “Say it, don’t spray it,” other boys sometimes said to him, though they took their lives in their hands when they did. If this was what all Jews looked like, Treslove thought, then Finkler, which sounded like Sprinkler, was a better name for them than Jew. So that was what he called them privately–Finklers.(17)

A subtitle for the book might well have been: “Jewish Identity: It’s Complicated.” Jacobson does an exemplary job of showing, not just telling, how absurdly complicated it is, as well as reminding the reader that racism should never be tolerated, even as it’s so prevalent and ingrained that many wish to dismiss it as benign. This book might have been helpful for me 17 years ago, as I considered converting to Judaism, based largely on the simplistic portrait painted by the rabbi I was studying with. Once I learned that Judaism could be just as silly, awful, complicated and misguided as the religion I was raised in, converting didn’t have nearly the allure it once did. It’s a good book, in that it provoked me to think about the continuing insidious influence of racism. But enjoyable it wasn’t. I have a hard time thinking of anyone I’d recommend this book to.

Next: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

One of my husband G. Grod’s favorite movies, the 1948 Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, only recently joined our video library. We watched the beginning with 5yo Guppy and 7yo Drake; they loved the swordplay sequences. But we stopped at the end of the diamond studs sequence, as what follows with Milady DeWinter would be very, very hard to explain. And it was in that contrast of tone that I think the film foundered. Is it a jolly adventure, or a dark tale of murder and adultery? The beginning and end suggest the former, but much of the movie is about the latter.

A new adaptation is due out this year. The cast looks promising, the director, not so.

Last year, Minnesota Monthly did a profile on local fashion and self-image blogger Sally McGraw. I liked her look, and loved what she had to say, so I started following her blog, Already Pretty. As this winter has dragged on, and on, I’ve found myself again and again reaching for cotton turtlenecks with the sneaking suspicion that neither Tim Gunn nor Sally McGraw would approve. I bit the bullet, and wrote to Sal:

I’m a stay-at-home mom and writer with 2 boys in NE Mpls. Right about now in winter is usually when I throw in the fashion towel. Boots, long underwear, turtlenecks under sweaters.

I struggle with winter mom fashion in MN in general, but am wondering, is there a way to wear cotton turtlenecks and look put together and not frumpy, or am I better off with non-turtles and scarves all winter long?

The response was what I had expected:

Now, turtlenecks. Honestly, they are tough to pull off. Very few people - myself included - actually look good in a close-fitting turtleneck. We wear them anyway when it’s freezing out and there are definitely times when warmth trumps fashion. If you love them lots, you can try doing a t-neck AND a scarf. Having something drapey and/or patterned to soften the harsh lines of the turtleneck helps a lot. You can also mitigate the high neck with a deep-v blazer. But going without turtlenecks and doing just scarves and cowls will look more chic and flattering. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

Her response, while disheartening, has not purged my turtlenecks from rotation, especially on days below 20F when I’ll be out and about. But it was a good reminder not to reach for the same old thing, and to give more attention to the scarves in my closet, of which there are more than a few.

I probably saw 16 Candles in the theater, as I was 16 when it came out. I do know I watched John Hughes’ genre-changing teen film again and again on VHS and on television. I identified with Molly Ringwald: I was a funny looking redhead with too-short hair and nowhere near the cute clothes she sports in this. I was a little afraid to watch it again after so many years. What if the suck fairy had got into it. My worry wasn’t unwarranted; there were a few things that nagged me. Overall, though, it was what I remembered, a sweet, funny film about a girl whose family is so wrapped up in the upcoming wedding of her older sister they completely forget her sixteenth birthday. I’d never noticed the Jane Austen-ish echoes before, but found them pretty clear this time, with a sensible girl surrounded by crazy relatives. Molly Ringwald is charming and likable as Samantha, Michael Shoeffling smolders sweetly as Jake Ryan, but it’s really Anthony Michael Hall who steals the show. He’s hilarious, both physically and verbally and his presence is what stops this from being too whiny or navel-gazing.

I have to admit to disappointment both with the racial stereotype of Long Duk Dong, and about a morally ambiguous morning after scene, but overall I thought the movie held up well. I still think the scene in front of the church at the end is one of the sweetest, most romantic ones in film. I’ve never understood the women who think Lloyd Dobbler was the perfect guy. Jake Ryan was it, for me, long before I knew the debt he owed to Mr. Darcy.

Oh, I loved re-reading Carter Beats the Devil, the next selection for Twin Cities’ book club Books and Bars. And I’m glad I liked it, since I was one of the people who recommended the book. What if I’d misremembered, or been in a weird mood, or hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t that good? I’m glad to say, none of these are true. Gold’s tale of vaudeville magic was as thumping a read the second time as it was the first.

The Overture with which it opens introduce Charles Carter, a stage magician in 1923, and a famous show which President Warren G. Harding attended. Amazing things happen, then the book recedes to Carter’s childhood:

“I’ll need an assistant sometimes.”

Their eyes met, and James’s watered. He looked away.

“It’s all right,” Charles added. “I can do it alone.”

James slipped into the tub, under the water, and then resurfaced. Later, Charles, too, would get into the tub, but for now he stood alone and held the rock in his hand, because it had already started for him: his hands felt naked without something in them–a card, a coin, a rope–and whenever they held something secretly, they felt educated. (66)

This book is enthralling historical fiction, with great characters from the golden age of magic including Houdini, suspense, mystery, tragedy and romance. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay it is to say that Gold blends history and fiction so entertainingly that I am utterly uninterested in researching what was “real” in the story. The show is so good that I don’t care to know how the tricks were done.