Allen Shawn

A really lovely little essay in the NYT magazine this weekend entitled Family Meal. Allen Shawn is son of the New Yorker editor and brother of that odd hummunculus of a man Wallace Shawn. Allen Shawn apparently has a twin sister Mary who was mentally retarded and institutionalized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22Food-t-001.html?oref=login#

It's a story of the sister Mary's annual visit home with the family for her birthday when their mother is 99 and completely infirm. The piece ends with the lines: 'How could I not cry when Piergiorgio recited these lines in Italian from a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo:

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra

trafitto da un raggio di sole:

ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth

transfixed by a sun ray:

and suddenly it is evening. '

The Post-Birthday World

This was exhausting...500 pages of a self involved heroine slogging through her boring life. The conceit is that a live-in couple in London have a friend they see every year for his birthday. The woman one birthday goes out alone with him and wants to kiss him, the narrative breaks into two threads, one where she kisses him, one where she doesn't and it's 450 more pages of the years that follow with the consequences for the characters. Michiko Kakutani from the NYT loved it I might add.
On top of this annoyance the author has the temerity to write in italics what I imagine are meant to be the character's imaginings of what one of the men is doing at that very moment. ARGGHHH...layer on layer of deception. This teeters perilously close to authors recounting character's dreams in books and expecting you to read them(I mean they're fiction and then they have dreams? Please.)...anyway this is something that WILL NOT BE TOLERATED by our heroine (me, in case you forgot.).
So don't bother with the book, but if you like the idea of the different paths our lives can take by chance I would say watch Kristof Kieslowski's Blind Chance or even that Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors. (the first hinging on catching or not catching a plane, the second (lower budget?) a subway.)This is probably where Ms. Shriver got the idea from.
Come to think of it maybe in a parallel universe somewhere I am not reading Post Birthday World and Michiko Kakutani is stranded on a desert island with only it to read...

Mas! Mas! Mas!

I have a very small collection of old Mexican movie posters, my favorite being the one above. It's from a movie called El Vestido de Novia (The Bridal Gown) with the provocative question below: ?Pierde la pecadora el derecho de llevarlo...? (Does the sinner lose the right to wear it?). This film stars someone named Ana Luisa Peluffo. I just Googled her and apparently she exists, was born in 1931 and made El Vestido de Novia in 1959. She is known for being the first actress to be seen nude on the Mexican screen. There are nude pictures of her on the web(not sure if she was the first on the web too) but since this is a family site I will leave it to you to Google them. She made 201 movies, according to them she made her name by appearing nude in the 50's, got bigger more serious opportunities in drama as a result, and then "returned to her roots" in the 70's. Meanwhile here she is in the flesh (well not all of it).

I didn't realise there were books about Mexican movie posters too and so I just got one called Mas Cine Mexicano which had some very wonderful old posters but none of the same ones I have. The Mas indicates that there was a prior book which I must have missed. Maybe Ana Luisa Peluffo will be immortalized in there returning to "her roots".

Careful Use of Compliments

Just whipped through Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith. On 7 day loan from the library, it was a space filler, a time waster. It was one of those books you can read quickly, which is good since all I wanted to do was get to the end. Not very good, but once you get invested in characters you are pretty much stuck. I am stuck with Isabel Dalhousie now, this is the 4th or 5th book, but at this point I just tolerate her.

Abort! Abort!

Did I tell you to read Any Human Heart by William Boyd? If so, sorry. Not that it's bad, just that it went on and on ...and on. At some point I realised that it would go on until the narrator reached the age of 83. I stopped at 38.

New York Times Kills Fiction

Last month I renewed my subscription to the New York Times. For a few heady weeks I was on top of it, reading every article and wanting to talk about it all. Poor George, after one particularly long current event laden phone conversation, there was a lull in the conversation, I could hear him sighing in relief. He is not used to having to talk about anything more pressing than 'what's for dinner?" with me. "Do you think they really had nuclear weapons in Syria? " I said. Gentle Reader, I can not repeat his response.

But fortunately for my relationship, reading the NYT and keeping up with it requires eternal vigilance---one moment of weakness, one skim of an article, one memo taken home to read on the train, one dipping into my novel in the morning and---I'm behind. It's like Ursula in 100 Years of Solitude constantly fighting off the ants invading the house in Macondo. She is always bustling through the rooms fighting them off with poisons and her energy. All the characters laugh at her and she seems like a crazy woman obsessed, but she never stops. The minute she dies though, they take over the house. I'll probably be found dead under a load of back issues of the NYT and the New Yorker. Suspect George!

Cranford

I just watched a BBC production of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. I always loved the book, very unlike all of Elizabeth Gaskell's other serious social issues sort of work, the book was light and fun. The show was 5 episodes and according to the credits based on 3 of her novels...not just Cranford. They must have thrown them in a blender. But still I loved it, anything with Imelda Staunton needs to be watched. She can make you laugh just by looking at her with her tough little frame and piggy eyes and nose and her proud carriage. If I were in Hollywood I would be pitching a romantic comedy with her. She could replace Cameron Diaz! Anyway, there is a reason perhaps I am not in Hollywood and am confined to watching the industry unfold on a 14 inch screen in the front room. Anyway Cranford had Staunton, Eileen Atkins, Michael Gambon, Judi Dench but no Ashton Kutcher. Needless to say it was marvellous.