The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel -- a Review

It is wonderful! It is marvelous. The costumes! The costumes are so Audrey Hepburn. The music is so Broadway. The street scenes are so New York! The humor! The humor is so funny! I love it!

The only caveat I have is that if you have tender ears, the language may be too coarse for you. But, then considering the current administration is also from New York, maybe it's just a sort of New York accent.

If, however, that is of no concern to you -- it is wonderful!

1958 New York City -- our vivacious, innocent (relatively,) enthusiastic heroine has graduated from Bryn Mawr, has been married to Mr. Right for four years, has two children (one of each,) and lives in a palatial apartment on NYC's Upper West Side (just a couple of floors down from her parents.) She follows the correct beauty regime, has the right kind of friends, is a wonderful cook, and is very supportive of her husband's dream to be a stand-up comedian.

What could go wrong?

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you so bad. But I have this thing about spoilers. Suffice it to say, everything that goes wrong is surprising and great material for a stand-up comedy routine. And I don't mean HIS. Kudos to the creator and writer Amy Sherman-Palladino along with Daniel Palladino.

Rachel Brosnahan is our Miriam "Midge" Maisel. She's already received a Critics' Choice Award and The Golden Globe as Best Actress for her performance in the series. And she is perfect.

You will be forgiven if you alternate between remembering Audrey Hepburn and Marlo Thomas's That Girl. Add a dash of Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman and a great dollop of Joan Rivers and you've got The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

There are even shadows of Downton Abbey -- The Weissmans (Midge's parents -- he's a professor at Columbia and she's a doyenne) did not raise their daughter to work!



Is she an exaggeration? I don't know. Maybe. Probably. But I do remember that my own mother did not grow up expecting to work outside the home. And, although we lived in a very small town in the middle of a fly-over state, she always dressed to go into The City. That meant hat, gloves, and matching bag and shoes.

Oh and the characters around the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel! The most perfectly WRONG kind of friends.

First and foremost Susie, played by Alex Borstein, who does not live on the Upper West Side, didn't go to Bryn Mawr, and who grew up in a family that didn't give a damn what she did. But Susie gets Midge. She recognizes talent when she sees it. She can imagine a STAR.

Borstein was nominated for a Critics Choice Award as Best Supporting Actress.


And Lenny Bruce! Yes, THE Lenny Bruce.

When I asked my daughter Grace and her friend if they knew who Lenny Bruce was. That drew blank looks.

"Was he a writer?" she asked.

Books and writers. Bookstores and libraries. These are the things that I've raised my children with.

"No!" I said. "He was a comedian!"

She and her friend Spencer broke into the lyric from Rent's La Vie Boheme, "Lenny Bruce. Langston Hughes. To the stage!"

That got a blank look from me. I have seen Rent and I do like it. But I don't know the lyrics, for heaven's sake.

Spencer immediately googled Lenny Bruce on their phone. "He was prosecuted and convicted for obscenity."

"Yes! Yes! That was him," I cried. "A comedian."

They had no idea.

"You probably don't even know who Bella Abzug was, do you?" I accused. "Feminist? Congress Woman from New York?"

"No but we know who Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan were," they responded.

 At least that's something. However, none of these women have anything to do with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

I did suggest that perhaps Grace and Spencer were not old enough to enjoy the series.

Grace pointed out "You enjoy Downton Abbey and you're not that old."

Well, that did rather burst my bubble. Having spent my fervor, I admitted a couple of anachronisms that a good editor would have caught. Things that should not have been in the scripts because they didn't exist yet. Keeping in mind the story is set in 1958. There were musical nods to later Rock and Roll.

And "Midge mentions 'pantyhose' which we didn't start wearing until the mid-60s," I said.

Blank looks.

"Remember girdles and garter belts?" I asked.

More blank looks.

Maybe not as old as Downton Abbey, but oh my. When did I get this old?

Never mind.

Watch it with Google close at hand. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is available on Amazon Prime.

P.S. The second season starts filming in March. (Filming? They probably don't use film anymore. "Starts production" I should say to cover whatever it is they do these days.)

Betrayal -- Book Review

Those of you who know me, know I like John Lescroart's police procedurals.

Goodreads calls this one a "thriller." And I suppose it is, but it's not the kind of thriller that will leave your stomach tied in knots or make you dread the morning's news. It may, however, just keep you up too late because you gotta see what happens next.

I do have the same complaint about it that I had the first time I read it. Uncharacteristically (pun intended) we don't really get Dismas Hardy or Abe Glitsky until Chapter 16. Of course, all that stuff that comes before is important to the plot.

Oh, his plots, his plots. Lescroart does really good plots. He doesn't spoon feed us readers, but if he puts it in the book, it is important to the plot. He definitely takes Chekhov's advice, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Betrayal was published in February, 2008. So Lescroart wrote it during the fourth year of the Iraq war. As a writer, I can understand the attraction of using current news stories in your work. And war seems to be a lucrative field, shot through with second-hand adrenaline for both writers and readers. Lethal flashes in the night. Explosions. Bullets peppering the ground around the new characters. Life and death -- conflict, conflict, conflict.

For me, I don't like it so much. But, it is necessary to the plot of Betrayal.

I was so glad when we got through the war part of the book. But then it was necessary to get through a trial without Dismas Hardy, our canny defense lawyer. In a courtroom not in our familiar San Francisco Hall of Justice.

The epigraph is a part of the book, I think, would better have been left out. In my opinion, there are some bits of a mystery best left to the readers imagination.

To be honest, I'd rather spend time with Lescroart's Hardy and Abe Glitsky, the dour police lieutenant, than with Lescroart himself. He's probably a very nice man, but I know his characters much better than I know him. I have a history with them.

To develop your own relationship with them, it's best to start with the first book in the series, Dead Irish. Each book is complete in itself, but the characters continue through the series -- maturing, losing loved ones, marrying, having babies, dying. And all the while searching for the truth. What really happened.

Barbara's Law -- A Review

image from Amazon.com

It's courtroom drama with a French twist. And it's good. Not so much because of the plots, but because of the characters.

With so many viewing options available to us these days it's odd to me that I have so much trouble finding something to watch. Traditional television, cable, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu. Even HBO is getting into the mix. I think if it weren't for local weather and news I'd just drop cable and get all my entertainment over the internet. (And that's probably the wrong preposition -- maybe 'from' the internet? 'on' the internet? 'off' the internet? You know what I mean.)

But like diamonds in Arkansas's Crater of Diamonds State Park and gold in Colorado's Clear Creek, if you sift enough sand, you're bound to hit pay dirt. I know, I know. Too many clichés.

The French television production 'Barbara's Law' is one of those welcome gemstones of television virtuosity. It's well written, well directed, and well acted.

The plots begin when our lawyer Barbara meets her client. The plots twist and turn just enough to keep you guessing about what really happened and whether or not her client might be innocent or at least innocent enough.

The characters are glorious and well-played. Barbara is a woman of a certain age with hair going to gray, somewhat overweight, and more than a little bossy. She sometimes likes her drink too much but she always cares even more about justice.

Her associate is erudite, intellectual, and gay. Her secretary is no-nonsense, efficient, and tolerant. Without these two, she'd get into more trouble than she does.

And her ?? -- I don't know what they call them in France, but I translated his role as private investigater. He's a fisherman whom she meets in places that may be typical for fishing but atypical for professional consultations. She trades envelopes we can assume to be stuffed with money for information.

Then of course, there's her dog Darius. I have no idea what his pedigree is. Think big, brown, destructive Newfoundland.

So far this mini series of three episodes is available on Amazon Prime. ('from' Amazon Prime?) I understand there is a second mini series but it is not currently available in the U.S. I tell you this up front because after you watch the three episodes that are available, you'll want more.

Another caveat is that it is in French. Yes, go figure -- a French TV show in French. What were they thinking? This means if you don't have more than my one semester of college French, you're going to have to use the subtitles.

Ah, yes. Subtitles. Many years ago when we moved to a small town in far southeast Arkansas, I visited a movie store there. If you're old enough, you'll remember movie stores. Blockbuster, Hollywood Video those were the big chain movie rental stores, but our town was too small to attract them. We had two independent movie stores and neither of them had a 'foreign film' section.

The first time I went to the larger of the two, I asked, "Where are your foreign language films." The young man told me they didn't have any. Then he asked "How many languages do you speak?" And I said "Just English, but I read it very well." He had no idea what I was talking about. He'd never watched a subtitled film.

My family's taste in movies tends to be global, but none of us speaks more than English -- a common failing in American public education, but that's another blog post surely.

Barbara's Law is subtitled and the subtitles flash across the screen pretty rapidly so it's best to be well-rested and turn off your cell phone when you watch because if you nod off or get a call you'll miss out. Of course, the good thing about watching on the internet is that you can back it up to get anything you miss.

Oh yes. In the interest of full disclosure, I do speak Southern and used to be reasonably fluent in Pig Latin.

The Lady in the Van -- Movie Review

image from en.wikipedia.org

A friend kindly loaned me The Lady in the Van on DVD. It's been years since I've watched anything but Downton Abbey on DVD. Did you know they include umpteen trailers for other movies that are apparently available on DVD. My husband pointed out that at least there were no ads for popcorn and Coke and no advisories to silence our cell phones.

And the way they choose which movie trailers to include completely escapes me. At least at the movie theater the attendant trailers are usually rated the same as the movie you went to see. You know, R-rated thrillers if you're there to see an R-rated thriller.

This movie is rated PG. All of the other trailers but one were rated R. Guess there just aren't many PG-rated films that the powers-that-be think will be of interest to adults. Or adults of a certain age. True. Maggie Smith movies tend to attract older people, of whom I'm one.

So now, I suppose I've put you younger people off. And movie reviews are supposed to encourage people to watch the film, if the reviewer liked it. Which I did. Very much.

And no, I can't in good conscience recommend it to you young people. Especially if you have close family members aged sixty and up. Or unusual characters who wander through your neighborhood. It will only frighten you.

It is, however, a wonderful movie that will make you laugh, discomfit you, and bring a tear or two to your eyes.

The Lady in the Van is "a mostly true story" by playwright Alan Bennett about himself and the odd homeless woman whom he allowed to live in her van in his driveway temporarily. Temporarily for the rest of her life.

Alex Jennings plays Bennett, a self-absorbed writer. So self-absorbed, in fact, that he is two characters -- one who writes, and one who lives. Jennings plays both parts. And they talk to each other. After all, Bennett the writer explains "writing is talking to one's self."

Maggie Smith stars as Miss Shepherd, The Lady. She is a mystery unfolding gradually as the movie goes along.

Miss Shepherd is unwashed and ungrateful. Gifts she accepts or rejects with equal disdain. She parks her van in front of this house and that in a not quite tony neighborhood in London. The neighbors don't want her there, but none is willing to be thought cruel enough to actually get rid of her. Certainly not our playwright.

Her logic? Well, it's unquestionable, albeit a bit specious. When neighbors tell her she can't park her van in front of their home she responds most reasonably with "I've had guidance.... The Virgin Mary. I spoke to her yesterday. She was outside the Post Office in Park Way."

The Lady is not attractive. She is not charming. She is outrageous. She's an embarrassment and a bother. And, yet, somehow, she's completely vulnerable. You want her to be safe. Maybe even happy.

So much about her character reminds me of people I have known.

Miss Shepherd gets Bennett to do things for her that he had no intention of doing including pushing her to the top of the street where she turned and free-wheeled back down with such joy and abandon it's infectious. You smile, perhaps laugh out loud.

photo from npr.org

(I used to work with a man in a wheel chair. He was NOT difficult in the least. He and his daughters would go to the zoo armed with lettuce. The elephant enclosure had a sidewalk running downhill outside its west fence. He would begin at the bottom of the hill where he would toss lettuce into the pen and the elephants would gobble it up. Then his girls would push him to the top of the side walk with the elephants following every step (roll?) of the way. He would turn and free-wheel down with the elephants in hot pursuit. He'd throw more lettuce into the elephants' pen and do it all over again.)

In the movie, a neighbor suggests that Miss Shepherd would be a "good subject" for Mr. Bennett.

"For what?" he asks.

"For one of your little plays."

Writer-Bennett argues with liver-Bennett. "One old lady is enough," he says meaning his mother who has Alzheimer's whom he features in his plays.

Here he is, caught between his mother's dementia and the demented lady living in his driveway.

His mother is put in a care home and The Lady gets a social worker. Two actually.

The first one is as ineffectual as the rest of the neighborhood. The second one is the proverbial do-gooder who will do good according to her own lights without regard to what their who-good's-done-to wants done good.

I used to work for the Welfare Department and believe me, I've known both kinds. Truth be told, I've been both kinds myself.

One of my favorite scenes is Mr. Bennett watching the ambulance driver who comes to take The Lady to something called a Day Center where she will be bathed and given clean clothes. The playwright watches this man treat The Lady with great respect, even putting his arm around her to help her into her wheelchair. Despite her stench.

(I understand. I once was charged with helping remove three neglected children from their filthy home. The youngest was five and hadn't had a bath in I don't know how long. She smelled so bad that when she held her arms up for me to take her it was all I could do to keep from stepping back -- a beautiful little girl who was in no way responsible for her condition. She didn't understand what was going on. She just wanted to be held.)

The very next scene is The Lady in her wheelchair on a lift rising into the ambulance -- like a queen.

Then when she returns to her van, Miss Shepherd asks "Mr. Bennett, hold my hand? It's clean."

Ah yes. Not a seven-hankie film. But Dame Maggie Smith makes it a good strong three-hankie film.

In the end there is a blue plaque with Miss Shepherd's name and the years she lived in the van parked in Mr. Bennett's drive. Thinking I would use a shot of that blue plaque, I discovered the Blue Plaque is apparently a 'thing' in London. There's a list in Wikipedia of blue plaques saying who lived in what house when -- Sylvia Plath, Sir Winston Churchill, Jimi Hendrix, etc.

It may be "a mostly true story," but The Lady's Blue Plaque is apparently artistic license. It's not on the Wikipedia list.

The Pluto Files -- a review

See all those pink Post-Its? They mark things I wanted to quote in this review; new bits of information I wanted to remember; funny things he said that I wanted to tell somebody -- my husband, my daughter, anybody who'd listen.

Too many, too many.

In The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson tells the history of not just Pluto but of our understanding of our solar system.

He explores America's proprietary attitude toward Pluto. Pluto has always been practically an American planet. It was, after all, discovered by an American and made famous as Mickey Mouse's best friend. How more American could it be? How could it be demoted from its planet status by a bunch of mere scientists?

Tyson recounts his own part in that demotion. The decision to exclude Pluto from the new Rose Center's exhibit of Solar System planets was made in order to save money should discussions, then ongoing in the world of cosmology, redefine 'planet' making Pluto no longer a planet and instantly rendering the exhibit wrong. 

Not because he led the anti-Pluto-as-a-planet movement, but because he was Director of the Hayden Planetarium and he had tacitly accepted the role of astrophysics-interpreter-in-chief, he was the lightning rod. He drew the fury of the American Press and school children from across the country, incensed and offended that their planet was no longer officially considered a planet. 

Third grade teachers throughout the nation recognized a teaching moment. 

And suddenly, Tyson (not the boxer) was a household name. Not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Anything that focuses America on something scientific rather than sports has got to be good -- any publicity is good, right? Even bad publicity. Or detestations from third graders.

And it wasn't just children. Songs were written. Editorial cartoons were published. Comedians had fodder. And other scientists, even astrophysicists, took professional exception.

There were debates. According to Tyson's accounts these debates were every bit as passionate and acrimonious as the current crop of political debates, complete with verbal fireworks. (Though I don't think birther considerations came into any of them.)

The International Astronomical Union did not define 'planet' until 2006. The same year the other Tyson retired from boxing and six years after the Rose Center opened setting off the Pluto-as-a-Planet controversy.  

But more seriously, how can it be that physicists come so late to the method of taxonomy long employed by biologists? Tyson does not explain that, but he does explore the current modes of organizing the celestial bodies by their physical properties.

As the brouhaha subsided, the letters from children changed. This letter Tyson received from 8-year-old Siddiq summed it up. "We just have to get over it. That's Science."

As all good scientist should do, indeed sensible humans of any stripe should do with any of our life questions, Tyson leaves open the possibilities of new information changing our closely held views of reality. Again.

To give Pluto the last word, Tyson shares how political cartoonist Aislin in the Montreal Gazette imagines Pluto's concern with all things human: 

Probably the best news for me is Tyson identifies Ceres as a Dwarf Planet. It was the largest of the asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt when I first started writing Murder on Ceres. A novel my husband describes as science fiction for people who like murder mysteries and a murder mystery for people who like science fiction. 

Best of Enemies -- a review

image from blu-ray.com

Best of Enemies, a 2015 documentary available streaming from Netflix, chronicles the 1968 televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal Gore Vidal.

In 1968, three television networks vied for American audiences. CBS was first among equals, closely followed by NBC. ABC was a distant third. Those were your choices. No FOX. No CNN. No cable at all. Not even PBS.

CBS and NBC planned to cover the 1968 political conventions gavel to gavel. ABC couldn't afford to. They had to come up with something to draw ratings away from their two rivals. And as someone in Best of Enemies says "nothing draws an audience like the sugar of a fight."

Do I hear the names Jerry Springer and Donald Trump?

In 1968, ABC gave birth to modern political punditry and point/counter point political commentary with these end of the convention day debates between America's most television savvy intellectuals, both from Eastener aristocracy stock. Pompous, but well-spoken and mostly restrained, each was absolutely confident he was right and the rest of the world could acknowledge that or be damned.

1968's national political conventions found the United States mired in the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights Movement continued unabated. Women's Liberation and the youth movement further fractured the nation.

Everything happened on TV.

January 30, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive.

March 31, sitting president Lyndon Johnson announced "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term" as President of the United States.

April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

May 4, four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

June 6, Robert F. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democrat nomination for President, was murdered in Los Angeles, California.

And every evening on the national news no matter which network we watched the TV news anchors gave the numbers. How many Americans were killed in Vietnam. And how many North Vietnamese.

August 5, the Republican Party opened their four-day convention in Miami, Florida, to nominate their candidate for President of the United States. The leading contenders were former Vice President Richard Nixon and then Governor of California Ronald Reagan.

August 26, a demoralized Democrat Party opened their four-day convention in Chicago, Illinois, a city run by iron-fisted Mayor Richard J. Daly.

Best of Enemies mixes extensive footage of the actual debates between Buckley and Vidal with comments and clips from the conventions and the real world then swirling around the conventions. There are illuminating comments from people close to the political actors of the time and to Buckley and Vidal.

In Best of Enemies, we get to hear again the dulcet tones of Senator Everett Dirksen speaking at the Republican Convention. We see snippets of the luminaries of the times -- Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Dick Cavett, the Kennedys, Norman Mailer. There's a clip from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, the iconoclastic TV show that gave a comedic raspberry to the foibles of American society and introduced the American public to fringe, go-go boots, and psychedelic humor.

Best of Enemies reminds us that passionate political views can be expressed at reduced decibels, intelligently.

Bernhardt's The Game Master -- a review

Let’s start with full disclosure.

William Bernhardt is my writing guru. He’s a brilliant, tolerant, and persistent teacher. If you have a book in you, he can help you get it down in black and white. And it matters not whether your book is fiction or nonfiction, a memoir or a cookbook.

Also thrillers are not my cup of tea. I find real life to be tense enough. Thrillers are generally too disturbing for me.

Having said that, I just completed Bernhardt’s new thriller. The Game Master is fast paced and intense enough that I need it set to music like an Indiana Jones movie, so I’ll know when it’s safe to look.

It gets off to a rocky start with someone I don’t know being treated most unkindly. In fact, if I had known when I started what I know now, I’d have started at Chapter 3. That’s when BB, the Game Master shows up playing in the final round of the World Series of Poker.

Then an FBI agent shows up and the chase is on. Paired with his ex-wife Linden, BB must escape from almost every conceivable (and some inconceivable) threats to life and/or liberty which then lead to one breath-taking dash after another to the next threat.

Until BB comes face-to-face (so to speak) with my favorite character, Alex. Alex has the endearing innocence of a curious child while he wields unlimited and amoral power. Like a baby rattle snake – kinda cute, but completely lethal.

It’s a global scavenger hunt with the obvious end-prize being BB and Linden’s kidnapped daughter and the survival of humanity.

Games abound – some ancient, some modern, some for children, and some for intellectuals – all bearing clues to the next step. The games were interesting in themselves. The twists and turns kept me reading and guessing.

Now it’s time to take a deep breath and get back to cozy mysteries!

Cities of the Plain -- A Review

Image from  thisismoney.co.uk

   Cormac McCarthy writes like I would like to write. Spare and strong. And this from the person who always says she doesn’t like Hemingway. By-the-bye, I do like Hemingway’s short fiction. And I can’t read McCarthy one after the other without the respite of other books. Even if you know nothing about the books before you start them, you soon get a sense of the despair and desolation that reviewers talk about. The sense that these people and their way of life are passing away.

   The first book of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses which introduces us to 16-year-old John Grady Cole who’s lost his grandfather and the ranch home he’s grown up on. It begins in 1949. Rather than move into town he crosses the border into Mexico and comes of age.

   In The Crossing we meet Billy Parham, the son of a rancher, at the beginning of and during World War II. Again we have a young man losing his family and his way of life. He can’t even get into the military and go off to war, the standard border between the way life was and the way it will be for most Americans during that time.

   In Cities of the Plain we’ve come to the last of the three books. Here John Grady and Billy are working on Mac McGovern’s ranch in the early 1950’s. A ranch destined to be bought by the government.

   McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is magnificent just as is the country where it takes place. Great distances filled with sky and earth, hot or cold sunshine and vast night. There aren’t that many people and the people who are there are as spare and hard as the country, as are their language and their relationships.

   This is a conversation between John Grady and Mac McGovern, the rancher he works for.

   John Grady listened to him going down the hall to his room. When he came back he sat down and placed a gold ring on the table.

   That’s been in my dresser drawer for three years. It aint doin nobody any good there and it never will. We talked about everthing and we talked about that ring. She didnt want it put in the ground. I want you to take it.

   Sir I dont think I can do that.

   Yes you can. I’ve already thought of everthing you could possibly say on the subject so rather than go over it item by item let’s just save the aggravation and you put it in your pocket and come Tuesday you put it on that girl’s finger.

   McCarthy is a poet when he describes this country.

The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

   McCarthy knows his people and he loves them. He recognizes the philosophers among the poor and resilient. John Grady comes to a blind musician to ask him to act as godfather for the woman he wants to wed. The old man tells him a story explaining why a dying man in great wisdom, chose his most hated enemy to be his son’s godfather. The story begins this way.

He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that a man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

   The enemy who became godfather to the man’s son found that he must dedicate his entire life to the son. Because there could never be forgiveness, the enemy could not ‘dislodge’ the man. A friend who had loved him could more easily have thought of his dead friend in comfort and sadness and eased himself under the burden of such a responsibility.

   The Border Trilogy are not comfortable books to read. Like the country, they are beautiful and threaten death. The people who inhabit these books are tough. Their lives are broken and battered by sudden and unforgiving violence. They do not so much survive as endure.

   Do not let your obs-comp grammar ways get between you and these books. There are still people like these – unassuming but not subservient, under-educated but not unknowing, not especially civilized but enlightened. And some are still cowboys.

Death Comes to Pemberley and Unnatural Causes -- Conjoined Reviews

image from bbcshop.com

  Kudos to the BBC production of “Death Comes to Pemberley” adapted by Juliette Towhidi from P.D. James’s novel of the same name. Which was an homage to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  

I watched the first of the two episodes of the television production, then read Ms. James’s novel before the second episode aired. As it turns out, I much preferred the TV production to the book.

  I don’t think anyone has ever heard me say that before. Well, there was Gone with the Wind. The movie was reissued and I saw it while I was in high school. Then I read the book. My teenaged and early adult self liked the movie better than Ms. Mitchell’s novel. Why? Because watching the movie I could believe that Scarlet was merely a victim of her times, doing what she had to to keep Tara going. And, of course, there was Rhett Butler/Clark Gable. And I wanted to believe he would come back. In the book, it was pretty obvious that Scarlet did what she wanted to to get what she wanted when she wanted it. And I thought she deserved to lose him. So, still being a romantic, I liked the movie version better.

  My mature self prefers the novel because I understand that what she did was amoral, but effective. She made sure that both she and Tara survived. And I admire her determination. She would come out on top, no matter what.

  But that’s not what I come here to talk about. This is about Jane Austen’s characters through the mind of P.D. James remolded by the BBC.

  The TV production follows James’s plot very closely with a few changes of who does what when and where. It makes wonderful use of Lizzie’s parents and sister Lydia, bringing humor to what could easily have been a dreary drama. Mrs. Bennet is the shallow, status-seeking, hypochondriacal woman we remember from Austen. And Lydia is her mother’s daughter (Bless her heart.) – a shamelessly self-centered drama queen. And dear Mr. Bennet is a sensible, tolerant man who hides in the library.

  Lizzie and Darcy are devoted to each other within the limits of their natures. Conflict. Conflict. And there’s even a sex scene which neither Ms. Austen nor Ms. James ever wrote for these characters.

  If the novel had not been written by the P.D. James, it would never have been picked up by any of the major publishers. Written from the point of view of an omniscient narrator who has no part in the story, it breaks the primary rule of current writing fashion by telling us rather than showing us.

  A good 85% of it is expository writing – another no-no in modern fiction. However, this I actually liked. It told me about the times. The modes of travel, dress, class distinctions, architecture, and manners. All things for me to think about.

  The novel hardly played the Bennets at all. And the romance between Darcy and Elizabeth is maudlin at best. Darcy is portrayed as having lost not only his arrogance but his independence because he is so overcome with love of Lizzie. Give me a break! A man like that could not hold the interest of Elizabeth Bennet – the Elizabeth Benet we all know and love from Ms. Austen would not love a besotted Darcy even for all the wealth and status which Ms. James keeps reminding us of.

  I’ve enjoyed James's stories on Masterpiece Mysteries all these years. Were they rewritten to make them exciting and suspenseful? I’d never read James before and I wondered how she could have received all the awards and recognition she has if Pemberley is an example.

  So I read Unnatural Causes, her third book. I like traditional murder mysteries. And I liked this one. Published in 1967, it precedes Death Comes to Pemberley published in 2011. In Unnatural Causes all the characters had motive, opportunity, and access to the means of murder. The climax is exciting and satisfying. In the tradition of her countrywoman Agatha Christy, Ms. James summarizes the plot and dastardly deed in the dénouement.

  In one scene James describes Adam Dalgliesh, her Scotland Yard detective, opening his bedroom window during the beginning of a storm coming in from the sea:

          “The wind rushed into the room swirling the bed cover into folds,
           sweeping the papers from his desk and rustling the pages of his
           bedside Jane Austen like a giant hand.”

Just so, she connected her genre to Ms. Austen forty-four years prior to publishing Pemberley.

  She marked Dalgliesh, as a writer of poetry as well as an Austen aficionado. She even includes an example of his poetry. (Creditable, but it would never make it on a slam stage.) I do not know whether she gave him those attributes as an inside joke or to give him some distinctive characteristic like the fastidious Poirot or the fiddle-playing opium user Holmes. Whichever, it works for me.

  I will read more of her mysteries but no more of her Austen. And I will continue to watch PBS's Masterpiece Mystery!

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver -- a review

My daughter has been trying to get me to read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible for a while now. I’ve been trying to get her to read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. Since I’m writing a review on Kingsolver’s book and Grace isn’t writing one on Irving’s, I guess you know who won this one.

Actually, I think I’ve won, because now I’ve read them both. And I’d give them each five stars. That means I think they’re worth reading more than once, which is the rarest of endorsements from me.

I am disinclined to read any book titled anything to do with a bible. And, having said that, I will add that books written in the first person are not generally my cup of tea. If you’ve read many of my reviews, you know all too often I begin them by saying this is not the kind of thing I read, but ….

And here we go again.

Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is written in first person from five women’s points of view -- a mother in her mid-thirties and her four daughters from ages fifteen down to five. The Price women accompanied their Baptist missionary husband/father from Bethlehem, Georgia, to the Congo during the 1960’s, a time of political upheaval in both places.

Nathan Price’s point of view is not recorded here. He is just another of the natural disasters that this family must face and survive. That said, this is a book that gives us strong female characters, each different and identifiable one from the other. And, I think, each is a realistic portrayal of women, not a homogeneous ‘they’ but a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ and a ‘she’ five times. Even the youngest sees things as she would see things, not as her sisters or her mother do.

In this book tension is sustained and heightened not by chase scenes and explosions and things that jump out at you, but by impending death and the fear of death. Death doesn’t stalk these five women and the people of the Congo like a jungle cat. It hangs in the humid air and lies curled beneath an elephant ear leaf. It shadows children in raggedy clothes and floats down the Congo River. It festers in the hearts of men – Americans and Belgians and Congolese – far away from the Price family. And in the ambitions and jealousies and fears of men in their village and in their own house.

The women come through this period in their lives, each in her own way. Though not always in a way that we might admire or seek to emulate, they each demonstrate that greatest of human strengths, they endure. 

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth -- a review

 

 

This is the most inspirational book I’ve ever read. I qualify this statement with the explanation that I’ve been out of my self-improvement stage for at least 15 years. I do not read inspirational books and you won’t find this one on those shelves at the bookstore.

 There are so many quotable statements in this book. I put post-its on the ones that especially spoke to me so I could come back to them for this review. The book looks rather like a porcupine with all those strips of paper sticking out around its edges.

Chris Hadfield was nine years old when he went to a neighbor’s to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. According to his book An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, he decided that very night that he wanted to be an astronaut. That probably didn’t make him a minority of one. But he dedicated himself to that goal, and he achieved it.

The first major obstacle to his ambition was his birthplace. He is Canadian. NASA only accepted Americans into the astronaut program.  There was no Canadian Space Agency then. “But . . . just the day before, it had been impossible to walk on the Moon. Neil Armstrong hadn’t let that stop him. Maybe someday it would be possible for me to go too, and if that day ever came, I wanted to be ready.”

Knowing full well that he hadn’t much of a chance at the job, he started right then to prepare himself. He did what any determined 9-year-old would do. He imagined what it would take to become an astronaut. He must be physically fit and he must fly.

He did have several things in his favor. His father was an airline pilot and flying was a part of his life. His parents encouraged education, responsibility, and good sense.

He flew in space three times – the first two during the Shuttle Era, first to MIR then to attach Canadarm2 to the ISS.

This photo was taken 7/2/2014 from the ISS of Hurricane Arthur

off the Florida coast. The object in the upper right quadrant

is Canadarm2 installed by Hadfield in 2001

His third space flight was on a Soyuz back to the ISS where he served as commander living in space five months, returning to Earth in May 2013.

 He talks about attitude. “Our safety depends on many tens of thousands of people we’ll never meet, like the welders in Russia who assemble the Soyuz, and the North American textile workers who fabricate our spacesuits. And our employment depends entirely on millions of other people believing in the importance of space exploration. We work on behalf of everyone, so we should behave the same way whether we’re meeting with a head of state or a seventh-grade science class. Frankly, this makes good sense even if you’re not an astronaut. You never really know who will have a say in where you wind up. It could be the CEO. But it might well be the receptionist.”

 About leadership. There was an emergency EVA just before he returned to Earth from his mission as ISS Commander. “Throughout the five-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, I felt a bit like a choreographer probably does while watching dancers perform; there was a sense of involvement and responsibility, a feeling of shared risk and reward, but also a necessity to detach and trust them to do their jobs properly.” He expresses pride in his team’s work on that EVA and in himself for “living up to NASA’s belief that I was capable of commanding the world’s spaceship.”

 

 

“Determined as I was to be ready, I was equally determined to enjoy myself. I lack the gene for martyrdom.” 

 



Here he is with his cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity"

with a few changes to the lyrics.

Give it a listen and a watch.

Longitude -- a review



In this day and age with our GPS and our smart phones and our Google Maps, it's hard to imagine a time when the world was being explored and travelled by people who literally didn't know where they were and had no dependable way to find out.

Longitude is well-written and follows a straight-forward path from need to discovery and implementation. Why longitude? Because in the middle of the ocean without knowing what your longitude is, you were lost. And being lost most likely meant death. You could misjudge the nearness of land and like Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell who, on a foggy night in October of 1707, ran his flag ship and three more of his five warships aground on the Scilly Isles, "dooming almost two thousand" of his troops. Or too often a captain misjudged the distance and the direction of land and "missed his mark -- searching in vain for the island where he had hoped to find fresh water, or even the continent."

They knew about longitude, but could not track it at sea. Latitude could be deduced "by the length of the day or by the height of the sun or known guide stars above the horizon." Longitude does not lend itself to these easily recognized and readily available markers. Scientists and mathematicians devised methods to tell where a ship was in relation to its longitude. Their methods like them reflected deep thinking and cumbersome equations, not easily implemented by the general sailing public. Nor were their equations all that dependable when a navigator was able to follow the instructions.

What they needed was a reliable clock. And this is the story of the self-educated English common man who developed just such a clock. For want of just such an instrument, countless lives and fortunes were lost.

The story of John Harrison's development of a clock that would keep time dependably during the rough and tumble of a sea voyage is a cautionary tale for those societies that  circumscribe their people's talents based on class. Or, though not applied in this clockmaker's case, based on race or religion or gender or sexual orientation or any other arbitrary measure of a human's value.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A Review of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

 



     On the word of Ernest Hemingway I read The Great Gatsby and started to read Tender Is the Night. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of his time in Paris during the early 1920's, he describes Fitzgerald as having written a great novel referring to Gatsby.

     So I read it.

     Hemingway touts the "mot juste -- the one and only correct word to use." He says he learned "to distrust adjectives" as he would later "learn to distrust certain people in certain situations."

     As frustrated as I get with Hemingway's lusterless and often unnecessary dialog attributions, I do like his clean, strong prose. He did use adjectives. Adjectives that infused his prose with life and passion. He wrote of what he called "false spring." After the trees had leafed out and he would feel joy at Spring's arrival then would sometimes come a return of winter. "When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason." Simple, strong adjectives.

     Then came Gatsby. 
     Her front lawn seems the most active thing about Daisy. "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens -- finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of it run."
     And there's Daisy and Jordan Baker. "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
     "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"

     If it is ennui which I miss, I can stream an emo music performance on You Tube. My attitude about both emo music and bored rich folk is the same. If they're bored with themselves, why would I be interested?

     But surely I must be missing something in Gatsby so I read on.
     Then came this gem from Daisy's husband.
     "Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empres' by this man Goddard?"
     "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. (This from our narrator.)
     "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be -- will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
     "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them."

     Throw in a little anti-Semitism and disparage the lower classes with whom it is all right to screw around. Bring in Gatsby, whose wealth is on a par with (or greater than) Daisy's crowd, but its source is unknown and his antecedents are even murkier. And you have a thoroughly disagreeable book.

     The plot is slow to develop. When it did, I immediately thought of Thomas Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which describes an equally amoral money-centric life-style. But does it better.

    I went back to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and reread what he said about Fitzgerald. He said Fitzgerald produced better work after his wife's first mental break down. So I was back on the hunt.

     I found Tender Is the Night. I got to page 8. "The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name."

     It didn't seem to matter how many more pages I read. Same song, second verse. Could get better... but I gave up trying to find where exactly the 'better' began.

     So, if you're tempted to read Fitzgerald, I would humbly recommend that you read Thomas Wolfe instead.

     And disregarding what I can only describe as his overly generous praise for Fitzgerald's work, I can recommend Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Now I shall have to check out some of the other writers he talks about in that little book. Surely I cannot be so disappointed in them.

The Lone Ranger--a movie review

What has this new Lone Ranger movie got? Flash and dash and a laugh or twenty-three. 

And Johnny Depp.

With a bit of computer magic there are more cliff-hanging, hair-raising, heart-stopping, spine-tingling sequences than I’ve ever seen. And so tongue-in-cheek that you’re bound to leave the theater laughing.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s more than enough graphic violence to earn it its PG-13 rating. In fact, it’s my opinion that the visual and auditory intensity of the movie should be quite enough to make it PG-13. That said, I had plenty of warning so I could close my eyes when I didn’t want to see what was coming. (I do that regularly in the movies, to the point that my daughter has punched me in the ribs thinking I’d fallen asleep. Well, to be fair, I’ve done that, too, but not in The Lone Ranger.)

I may be old, but not old enough to remember the radio Lone Ranger. I do remember the TV Lone Ranger. I loved it as a kid. This is not my father’s Lone Ranger, nor my generation’s Lone Ranger, but if you remember those Lone Rangers, you’ll get more of the jokes.

Johnny Depp has brought us The Pirates of the Caribbean Goes West. They play fast and loose with geography, history, physics, and probability theory. But the bad guys are ugly and mean. The whore has a heart of gold and a leg of another precious material. The school marm doesn’t teach school but she’s lovely, sweet, and vulnerable. And the hero wears a white hat.

What more could you want?

A side-kick, of course. Who, in this movie, is really the main character. Johnny Depp as the wise and wonderful wizard of odd. He’s Tonto wearing a dead crow on his head and leading the wrong brother by the nose into hero-hood.

And the score is grand. I swear I heard bits of Carmina Burana in there. Well, maybe not, but they finally did get around to The William Tell Overture and Silver reared up and The Lone Ranger shouted “Hiyo, Silver! Away!”

To which Tonto responded… Well, that would be giving it away. Go see the movie and don’t be afraid to laugh.