A Richard Brody Review of “Christmas Holiday” (1944)

August 10, 2012 at 8:02 pm (Movies, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: , , , ,

From The New Yorker of 6 August 2012 (“Critic’s Notebook”):

Deanna Durbin was one of Hollywood’s most popular actresses before she retired, in 1949, at the age of twenty-eight.  Her apparent unease with performance folds poignantly into her starring role in “Christmas Holiday,” Robert Siodmak’s film noir of romantic degradation, from 1944.  She plays a singer/ prostitute in a sleazy New Orleans dance hall who takes the stage with her arms pinned limply to her sides and her eyes asking in despair, “What am I doing here?”  The rest of the movie, told largely in flashbacks, provides the reason:  fallout from her marriage to a fast-talking, glad-handing heel (played with unctuous charm by Gene Kelly).  Siodmak makes performance his subject, with scenes of an orchestra playing Wagner and Beethoven, lovers singing at a piano in a parlor, and a society band at a swank café, where, in a cunning crane shot of a saunter down a staircase –  with Kelly’s leonine grace and Durbin’s homely footfalls –  he condenses the drama to a thwarted dance.

Dear blog readers, self thinks this is the first time she’s ever heard of Gene Kelly playing the role of a less-than-totally-nice guy.  Shows you how little she knows.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

1 Comment

Thirty Minutes to the Last Day of July 2012

July 31, 2012 at 6:50 am (Books)
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Self is teaching an on-line memoir class, and her students are amazing and lively and curious.

There’s that, to begin with.

Then, the sense of satisfaction with the day (still Monday) is that she got to see the “Dark Knight” movie, which she’d rate probably a B+.

Then she mailed a story to Conjunctions.

And she joined yet another contest.

Now she is reading, from her Pile of Stuff, a back issue of The New Yorker. Apparently, the day’s lessons are still not over, for she finds herself absorbed in a review of a World War II novel (as if self hasn’t read dozens of those already; yet she feels drawn to each new book that comes out and invariably finds herself spending more time on reviews of World War II books than on any other types of books). And here are the things she’s discovered:

The author of the novel (whose title is weird and whimsical at the same time: HHhH, which stands for — oh, never mind what it stands for. Take self’s word for it, it is weird and whimsical) is a “French writer and academic” named Laurent Binet. That fact means nothing to self, and might even have caused self to stop reading the rest of the review, except that Binet asserts that “invented facts — invented characters, for that matter — have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally.” Binet has written: “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.”

Binet’s novel turns out to be about a monster named Reinhard Heydrich — and self, who has read so many books on World War II, had never heard of this particular monster. Self learns that Heydrich “planned Kristallnacht.” She is properly chastised about the depth of her World War II knowledge. She reads on.

An important event during World War II was the convening of the Wannsee Conference, on January 20, 1942. The name rings a bell, but it is not as loud as the bell that went off in self’s head when she read that the conference was held “in an elegantly somber villa on the shore of Lake Wannsee.”

A few sentences on, self learns that there is a “beautiful memorial in Berlin’s Grunewald S-Bahn station, which calmly records the numbers, dates, and destinations of each of the city’s mass deportations of Jews (all of whom left from the station).” Self has been in Berlin and wishes she’d read this review before. But of course, she couldn’t have, because she was in Berlin in 2005, and Binet hadn’t written the novel yet, and James Woods hadn’t reviewed it (of course), and if he’d never read the novel he’d never have written the review and would never have thought of mentioning Grunewald station.

And then self reads that “many of those present at the Wannasee Conference lived justly shortened lives” (Self almost cheers). Heydrich himself was assassinated, four months later, in Prague, by two Czech parachutists sent by the Czech government-in-exile in England. Heydrich was riding through Prague in an open-topped Mercedes, and his driver had to slow as the car rounded a bend in a city street. And that was where the men chose to attack.  SPOILER ALERT!  The men’s guns jammed but one had the presence of mind to throw a grenade, and Heydrich died a week later when he developed septicemia.  “Reprisals were blind and absolute: the village of Lidice, near Prague, mistakenly thought by the Nazis to have some connection with the parachutists, was burned to the ground . . . “

(In the meantime, The Man, who went to bed two hours ago, apparently is still able to whine, in the middle of a dead sleep: YOU’RE MAKING TOO MUCH NOISE WITH YOUR TYPING. He’s like an octopus that never sleeps. Neeeever sleeps)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

Three New Movies for the Netflix Queue

July 29, 2012 at 7:46 am (Lists, Movies, Recommended)
Tags: , , , , ,

Self is so excited!  She is really making progress on her HUMONGOUS Pile of Stuff!  Now she can actually see the bottom of this huge box where she stuffed everything she’s received in the mail since the start of the year!  Oh happy happy joy joy!

The latest thing self yanked out of the box was a copy of The New Yorker, the Mar. 19, 2012 issue.  Self doesn’t know how in the heck this issue got lost for so long, but never mind.  The capsule reviews in the front of the magazine all refer to movies long gone. Movies like “Friends with Kids” (Of all things, The New Yorker criticizes it for being “smug,” for not showing a “hint that other worlds and values may be beyond the city limits” BWAH HA HAAA!) and “Safe House” (Ryan Reynolds doing Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment

Found in The New Yorker, Talk of the Town (March 12, 2012)

July 28, 2012 at 2:59 pm (Lists, Places)
Tags: , , ,

Three great opening sentences (What, you expected more from self this morning?  Excuuuse me!  It is Saturday morning and there are ga-zillions of farmers markets, all over the place! And as you can see from the date of the issue about to be quoted from, self is extremely extremely backed up with her reading!)

Without further ado:

  • Opening Sentence # 1:  “Broadway, like New York City, is a place where petty comforts are fought for but rarely won.” (from a piece by Michael Shulman about the installation of ergonomic seats in Broadway theaters)
  • Opening Sentence # 2:  “On one of those indecisive early winter afternoons –  warm in the sun, nippy out of it –  Chucker Branch” (What a great name, by the way:  self must use in a story!) “and Christine Lehner, his partner, were on the roof of the Whitney Museum, winterizing their bees.”  (from a piece by Calvin Tomkins)
  • Opening Sentence # 3:  “Given that the area surrounding City Hall has the highest birth rate of any neighborhood in Manhattan, adding a kids’ store to the strip of Park Row occupied by J & R Music and Computer World would seem to be a no-brainer, like wearable speakers for expectant mothers.” (from a piece by Robert Sullivan about the opening of J & R Jr.)

Leave a Comment

Settling In: The New Yorker of 28 May 2012

July 10, 2012 at 12:15 am (Books, Lists, Recommended)
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Oh, The New Yorker.  Self knows it’s one of the delights of coming back home:  catching up on all those back issues.  She’s currently on the May 28, 2012 issue, and these are some of the books mentioned in the Briefly Noted section:

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain:  a group of Iraqi veterans spends Thanksgiving Day watching the Dallas Cowboys.

“A pitch-perfect ear for American talk drives the satire:  the members of Bravo Squad speak in an endless stream of vulgarity, and the Texans who surround them talk of ‘double y’im dees’ and ‘acks of sack-rih-fice.’ “

The Spoiler, by Annalena McAfee:  about “a London newsroom at the brink of the digital age.”

“The plot consists of two tales of humiliation,” one involving “a legendary war correspondent” who “has been reduced to writing about her declining health” and a “tabloid hack who is stuck writing articles with titles like Top Ten TV Bad-Hair Days.”

A Sense of Direction, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus:  a book about pilgrimages:  Camino de Santiago in Spain, Shikoku in Japan, and Uman, in Ukraine.

He makes the three treks –  Catholic, Buddhist, and Jewish, respectively — as a secularist, hunting for clarity while nursing his blistered feet:  “In my terror of stasis I had chosen motion; in my total absence of stability or routine I felt both electrified and panicked.”

In addition, today self was able to check out two mysteries from the downtown Redwood City Library:  Jesse Kellerman’s Trouble, and one of Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe novels (She’s read three others and finds them almost as addictive as reading Henning Mankell), The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

She finished reading the The 9/11 Commission Final Report (She’s glad she had a long plane trip to really concentrate) and is now beginning Lauren Groff’s novel, The Monsters of Templeton.

Self thinks it is pretty amazing that she is ambulatory:  she got only two hours sleep.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

And the Doctor Will See You Now . . .

May 29, 2012 at 12:10 am (Books, Family, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended)
Tags: , , , ,

Self has been a voracious consumer of writing by doctors, for over two decades.

For a while, her short story, “Lenox Hill, December 1991″ (published in the first Charlie Chan is Dead anthology) was taught in a Pennsylvania medical school, in an “Ethics of Medicine” class.  It wasn’t really a short story, self will admit right now.  It was memoir.  It was about her sister.

Now, she is reading the latest in a long line of fascinating books that began with Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, and included books by Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese (many of whose writings she first encountered in The New Yorker) and Stanford psychiatrist Irwin Yalom.  The last such book she read (before How Doctors Think) was Christine Montross’s Body of Work:  Meditations on Mortality From the Human Anatomy Lab, which was one of her favorite reads of last year.  She liked the Montross book so much, she even recommended it to her nephew William, Dear Departed Sister’s second child, who’s now in medical school in Washington University in St. Louis.

And now she’s reading Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think.  And she simply can’t put it down.

In the section self just finished reading, a middle-aged single woman named Rachel decides to go the solo mothering route and adopts a baby from Vietnam.  The baby was supposed to have been “released” at six months, but two months before Rachel was expecting to fly to Vietnam, she received a call that the adoption had been expedited, and she could pick up the baby in July.

Rachel arrived at the hospital in Vietnam, and was momentarily confused because the baby she was shown was much thinner than in the photographs she had been receiving.  She was so overjoyed, however, that she didn’t question the hospital staff, and took the baby back with her to the United States.

On the flight home, the baby hardly slept, and hardly sucked.  Rachel was fortunate that she had a relative who was a pediatrician, and she asked for advice.  The relative said it sounded as if the baby was dangerously dehydrated.  “Take her to an emergency room right now,” the relative advised Rachel.

And this was the beginning of a long, long excruciating journey in which the baby’s mouth was discovered to be covered in fungus, which was spreading, and that her lungs were clotted with pneumonia virus.  And the woman Rachel absolutely never gave up.  Then, shortly after dawn on September 11, 2001 –

Yes, you read right, dear blog readers.  Shortly after dawn on September 11, 2001, the latest tests on the baby showed her to be at last free of infection!

And Rachel was so overwhelmed with joy that she decided to share the news with a member of her church, and called her from a payphone in the hospital.  The woman seemed to hesitate and then told Rachel:  “Turn on your TV.”

!!!!

Rachel brought her baby daughter home, 45 days later.  This story, at least, has a happy ending.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

4 Books From The New Yorker’s Briefly Noted, 2 April 2012/ The Travails of a Wednesday

May 23, 2012 at 4:55 pm (Books, Calls, Conversations, Family, Lists, Weather)
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The first two books on this list are novels; the last two are nonfiction:

A Partial History of Lost Causes, by Jennifer Dubois

“An American woman, fleeing a slow and humiliating death from Huntington’s disease, arrives in Russia in search of an answer to a question posed by her dead father:  What is the proper way to proceed when playing a game one is destined to lose?”

These Dreams of You, by Steve Erickson

“An unemployed professor and former novelist finds himself ineffectually resisting bankruptcy and foreclosure; his wife becomes obsessed with finding their Ethiopian daughter’s natural mother, who may be alive and in trouble.”

Brave Dragons, by Jim Yardley

“Yardley provides incisive accounts of basketball’s history in China and of the N.B.A.’s desire to monetize its popularity there, alongside colorful portraits of the players and hangers-on.”

Monty and Rommel, by Peter Caddick-Adams

“Near-contemporaries, both men were wounded in the First World War and became Field Marshalls in the Second.  Both, Caddick-Adams suggests, were master communicators, and perhaps should not have been promoted from the battlefield, where they excelled, to a strategic level, where they did not.”

*     *    *     *

This has turned out to be quite a trying week, dear blog readers.

For one thing, the husband has been playing this tiresome charade where he pretends to be sick and coughs right in her face.  This, she knows, is because she is about to leave for Scotland, where he imagines she is going to go wild downing bottles of Talisker (On the other hand, things could be worse:  the man could actually be sick, in which case, it will only be a matter of hours — no, minutes! –  before she herself is laid flat with the viral flu)

Self has told him time and time again that she is going away to work.  Not only that, she has looked up the temperature in that part of Scotland and the lows are 43 degrees.  She decides to compare to Redwood City (which is quite chilly today, self is wearing three T-shirts and one pullover, as well as thick socks, and because the wind is so brisk, she has decided not to step out of the house at all) and feels quite faint when the temperature for her area, right now, is 70-something degrees.  She thinks back to Dharamsala and remembers how she shivered under four comforters, even with the heater right next to her bed and going all night (It was one of those old-fashioned coil ones, it reminded her vaguely of a Westinghouse electric fan, and she dreaded knocking it over in her sleep because she was sure she would end up burning to death), and she’s already decided to pack sweaters and thermals and thick socks and woolen scarves, etc etc etc

She happened to give a call to British Airways and was informed that there are no airports in the vicinity of Cambridge (where she has a friend she’d like to meet), and she’s better off going to London and catching a train south.  “Cambridge is south?” self repeated, rather stupidly, and the British Airways woman said, “You are heading to Edinburgh, which is north.  And Cambridge is in the other direction.  South.”

This reminds her of the time, just a week before she left for her first trip to India, when she ended up asking the husband whether New Delhi was near Calcutta. (Her brain feels like it’s been on hold for the past year, dear blog readers.  Perhaps one day, she’ll put it all down, in a book)

Bella The Ancient One got stuck three times in the doggy door.  But it is The Ancient One’s heroics that truly move self, for the dog is about a hundred-plus years old (in equivalent human years) :  still she crawls manfully through that damn doggy door, up and down a flight of stairs to the backyard, to pee.  Self has suggested to hubby that we put a ramp over the stairs, but he thinks it is good exercise for The Ancient One to go up and down steps.

The vet just called, asking why self had not yet picked up The Ancient One’s pain pills ($86 for a month’s supply)

Son called and mentioned that he wanted to know how much it cost to rent a car for a week, and self replied that she couldn’t remember but suggested he try Dollar.  She reminded him to mention that he is a Triple-A member, for the 10% discount.

What else?  She got form rejections from Third Coast and Tin House.  She persists in thinking that the one from Tin House was slightly encouraging.  It was worded:  “Sorry to have to turn you down this time.”  It’s those last two words, “this time,” that self keeps re-playing in her head.  They must really want her work, self thinks.  Or why would they even bother to put “this time”!!!  Perhaps she didn’t get the standard standard rejection, just the medium standard rejection.  Or the slightly standard rejection.  Whatever it is, self is sure she didn’t get the out-and-out rejection from Tin House.

(Which neighbor is it that keeps trundling trash cans back and forth across the sidewalk?  She swears she must have heard that dragging-the-trash-can sound at least five different times in the last two hours.  Every time she peeks out, the sidewalk is empty, and the trash cans are still in place.  Maybe it’s just some kid, dragging his skateboard across the cement . . . )

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

Monday Morning: Edith Wharton, By Way of Jonathan Franzen

May 21, 2012 at 3:29 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Insomnia, Women Writers)
Tags: , , , , , , ,

It is early on Monday morning, the next to the last Monday of May 2012.

Self has decided that she will stay home most of the day –  until, that is, her appointment with her dentist.

A tooth fell out on Friday –  can you imagine?  She wasn’t even chewing.

She’s making great inroads in her pile of stuff, though!  At least, the New Yorkers she’s reading now are only three months old!

In the New Yorker double issue of February 13 & 20, she finds an essay by Jonathan Franzen on the subject of Edith Wharton.  This is a matter of no small interest.  Last July, when self was cooling her heels in Bacolod, she had the House of Mirth with her.  Self doesn’t ever remember reading Wharton before (There are huge gaps in her knowledge:  For instance, it wasn’t until she was 25 and enrolled at Stanford University that she read Moby Dick)

Anyhoo, reading Wharton in Bacolod was an experience like no other (the way reading Saramago’s The Cave in December in Bacolod was like no other.  The way reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder in March in Bacolod was like no other.  The way –  Eeeeek!  Self, get a grip!!)

Self had insomnia, Lily Bart in the House of Mirth had insomnia, it was the insomnia pity party all around! (In the meantime, there was the pretty laundry lady at L’Fisher Chalet who kept visiting self in her room every three days, to tell self she was so fat)

So, FINALLY, here we are at Jonathan Franzen’s essay.  The title of the essay is “A Rooting Interest:  Edith Wharton and the Problems of Sympathy.”

The purport of the article seems to be that Edith Wharton was a snob.  Not only that, she was a rich snob.  Here’s Franzen:

To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage.

Wharton lived in a “rich-person” precinct, indulged “her passion for gardens and interior decoration,” toured “Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffered cars,” and hobnobbed “with the powerful and the famous.” Her one irredeemable disadvantage was the fact that “she wasn’t pretty.”

So she settled down to 28 years of a sex-less marriage to Teddy Wharton.

Her only sexual relationship was with a “bisexual journalist and serial two-timer,” when she was “in her late forties.”

Enough, Mr. Franzen, enough!  Self thinks that none of these salient facts have anything to do with the way reading House of Mirth would reduce self to a pile of quivering jello, all the while she was imbibing Bacolod rum at the Negros Museum Café!  At the end of every day, self would imagine that she was Gillian Anderson, who played Lily Bart in the movie, wandering the back streets of Bacolod (standing in for New York:  self knows that is quite a stretch), heading for her demeaning job at a hat factory.

Self will proceed:

“In her forties,” Wharton “finally battled free of the deadness of her marriage and became a bestselling author; Teddy responded by spirallling into mental illness and embezzling a good part of her inheritance.”

Ugh.  Ugh.  Ugh.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

The New Yorker of 6 February 2012

May 18, 2012 at 3:01 am (Artists and Writers, television)
Tags: , , , ,

The New Yorker of 6 February 2012 (which self just pulled out at random from her still-humongous pile of stuff) has a picture of the singer Laura Del Rey.

The young woman is looking at the photographer from behind a pair of heart-shaped glasses with brownish lenses.  She has long, flowing hair.  She is wearing a white top with scattered orange polka dots.  She is clutching something in one hand, and holding it up before her face:  It says “BAD.”  She wears a heavy, gold chain necklace and diamond-studded earrings.  The caption underneath her picture says:

Laura Del Rey’s music is theatrical, noncommittal, and better on recordings than in person.

At first, self began this post thinking she was going to say something about a book set in North Korea.

But self adores the writing of New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones.  She’s quoted her before, elsewhere in this blog.  Frere-Jones describes Del Rey’s music thus:

Del Rey has managed, like a slow car in the left lane, to make everyone around her angry and over-invested, despite doing relatively little.

BWAH.  HA.  HA.  HA!

She sang on Saturday Night Live and Juliette Lewis slammed her performance on Twitter (which is why self doesn’t tweet — it’s too easy to get lured into writing impulsively, without discretion).

Brian Williams (What would he know?) sent an e-mail to Gawker’s Nick Denton, saying, quote:  that Del Rey’s performance was “one of the worst things in SNL history.”

*     *     *     *

Since self has just renewed her New Yorker subscription to the year 2016 (Again, BWAH HA HA!) she is obviously enamored of their writers.

This issue has a short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle, who she has actually met in person.  At a reading he gave in Foothill.  During which he came off as very relaxed and friendly and cool.

The short story is called “Los Gigantes,” and it has a killer opening:

At first they kept us in cages like zoo animals, but that was too depressing.  After a while, we began to lose interest in what we’d been brought there to do.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

7:46 a.m.: Two More “Briefly Noted” Books (from The New Yorker of Many Years Ago: June 2010)

May 10, 2012 at 3:02 pm (Books, Lists, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: , , , , ,

What is happening?  Self’s pile of stuff is sprouting New Yorkers from 2010, eeeek!

This morning, she has time only to peruse the Briefly Noted section.  Good thing there are two worth quoting from:

  • Margaret follows her astronomer husband to the naval base on Mare Island, near San Francisco, where she slowly realizes that his intellectual pursuits have ossified into a kind of madness. (from the review of Jane Smiley’s new novel, Private Life)
  • This affectionate, though misconceived, biography of E. M. Forster is less about his writing than about the nearly fifty years of silence that followed the success of A Passage to India, in 1924 . . .  linking his career-long artistic project — to dramatize the search for “an honest connection with another human being” –  to his own pursuit of romantic fulfillment.  (from the review of Wendy Moffat’s biography of Forster, A Great Unrecorded History)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Leave a Comment

« Older entries Newer entries »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 163 other followers