I haven’t collected my book reviews in a few months. One of the reasons I’ve been reading so many 60-year-old Patrick Dennis novels of late—besides the fact that they’re awesome—is that I’ve been digitizing my private collection, and save for the two Mame books, Dennis simply isn’t in print any longer. Which is a shame, because there are few satirists as ruthless.
Death Comes to Pemberley
by P.D. James
1 Star
As a casual fan of James' Dalgleish detective novels, and as someone who loved her entry into science fiction, The Children of Men, I was quite happy to follow the author down a new avenue of genre writing: the Austen pastiche.
However, Death Comes to Pemberley is simply not good. James obviously intends the novel to be a rather light-hearted tribute with a detective twist. Instead, it comes off as a slow-moving, lumbering Frankenstein's monster of a work, stitched together from an uninspired modern-author Austen sequel, and a couple of never-made episodes of CSI: Regency England and Law and Order: Derbyshire.
None of it's convincing. Worse, none of it is really interesting. I kept hoping the killer was Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hiding out in the woods with a knife like a madwoman. I was disappointed even on that front.
Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes, and Trends of the 70s and 80s
by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Brian Bellmont
3 Stars
For a book devoted to the wacky ephemera of the decades of my childhood, Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? is curiously short on illustrations, anecdotes, and or any hint of just good clean fun. It's as dry as a fossilized old box of Quisp.
Still, this encyclopedia-like look at lost consumer culture manages to hit some notes of nostalgia (Peanut Butter Koogle, anyone?) and mines some memories that, on the whole, might be better left forgotten.
The Companions
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 Stars
Those who dismiss Sheri S. Tepper's books as too strident in their feminist and ecological concerns need only take a look at the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential campaign for retort. It provides almost too many examples of the ways in male public discourse at the very highest levels that women—and their reproductive systems—are reduced to mere vessels, sluts, and handmaidens, almost as extremely as they are in Tepper's dystopian Gibbon's Decline and Fall. That Tepper always has axes to grind in her novels should not lead anyone instantly to dismiss her. They're valid axes.
That said, The Companions is one of the few Tepper novels I never bothered to re-read after its initial release. When I picked it up again recently with no clear recollection of the plot, I was only a few pages in when I remembered dismissing it as "Tepper's dogs-in-space novel", in 2003. And yeah. It does have dogs in space.
What I didn't notice the first time around, however, was how beautifully-written huge chunks of the novel actually are, and how rich the world-building, and how complex the linguistic systems that Tepper explores. The primary story of Jewel Delis and the dogs she's attempting to save is both affecting and sweet, and had me sniffling back tears by the book's end.
True, a lot of the book's climax seems accomplished by having the main characters explicate a heck of a lot of material, and sometimes the book's premise seems almost too richly elaborate. But there's force and sheer will powering the novel's plot, colored as always by both Tepper's intertwined fatalism and humanism.
Every Step You Take: A Memoir
by Jock Soto
3 Stars
Reading dancer Jock Soto's memoir is a bit like skipping dinner for a supper of circulating tiny hors d'oeuvres at a swank cocktail party—there are plenty of tasty morsels, though nothing really fills you up.
The book is initially narrated as if it's a memoir about a mixed-heritage gay man's relationship with his mother . . . but it's not, really, though it's obvious her passing affected him deeply. It should perhaps have been a comprehensive look at Soto's career as principal dancer within the New York City Ballet, but his early training is quickly related and anyone attempting to glean hard information about his work with George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins or any of the other hundreds of talented choreographers and artists with whom he worked will come away disappointed. As a chronicle of its time, it suffers; Soto sums up the nineteen-eighties simply by tossing a mixed salad of names into a paragraph (Andy Warhol! Debbie Harry! Basquiat! Keith Haring!) and calling it a day.
The book's odd pacing and structure is made even more digressive by the inclusion—or interruption—of several of the author's favorite recipes. I like recipes. Just not necessarily in my dance biographies. And I don't want to spoil anyone's experience of the book and its cuisine, but one of the recipes is more or less "Hey, why not spread some caviar on a toasted bagel?"
The book is a swift, light read, and was interesting enough to make me not really notice how much of it was empty calories. A full meal, however, it is not.
Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny
by Nile Rodgers
4 Stars
In the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, when the U.S. public opinion of disco music soured, Nile Rodgers was among those who took the backlash the hardest. There's an affecting anecdote in his chatty and informal autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside-Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny in which he and his partner in the Chic empire, Bernard Edwards, stood alone and ostracized in a nightclub during those disco-sucks days because record studio executives were simply too frightened to be seen passing beneath a doorway with the word 'disco' emblazoned in small neon.
Though it's over thirty years since that incident, it still seems to haunt Rodgers. The man built his musical empire on the backbone of the elegant and eminently funky Chic, a band that propelled not only disco and dance music to new artistic heights, but influenced generations of musicians in all genres that followed. And yet, curiously, the Chic years are glossed over in this autobiography, despite the band's chart domination and succession of hits. There's more space devoted in Le Freak to the production of David Bowie's Let's Dance album than there is to the formation and many successes of Chic.
To an extent, that's fine—Rodgers has endured and flourished as a producer in the time since Chic, and that's clearly where he believes his legacy lies. There's quite a lot of interesting information here about his transition to mainstream radio-friendly production during the nineteen-eighties with David Bowie, Duran Duran, and especially with his hand in making Madonna into the cultural icon she is. And if he doesn't go into detail over even some of his most popular material (no mention of The B-52s and Cosmic Thing, for example) or my personal favorites (not a word about Debbie Harry's Koo-Koo), it's simply because he produced so many acts during those years.
The bulk of the book devoted to Rodger's early upbringing by heroin-addict parents, and his constant relocation from New York City to Los Angeles and back again, is pretty fascinating stuff. It comes as no surprise that Rodgers battled addiction issues of his own, during his career. What is astonishing, however, is how he thrived in spite of it.
Still, for those of us of a certain age who regarded Chic as a pinnacle of dance music achievement, and Rodgers as a personal hero of sorts, the thoroughness with which he distances himself from Chic's urban sheen in favor of the safer (and whiter) music of Bowie and Madonna is a bit disconcerting. Perhaps Rodgers—who was raised by bi-racial parents and who rightly rails against the segregational and racist tendencies of studio and radio executives—still has a few more demons to tackle.
Genius
by Patrick Dennis
5 Stars
To keep it short and sweet, Genius lives up to its title.
This most engaging and carefully-plotted of Patrick Dennis' social satires is at once both a vicious lampooning of—and a comic valentine to—the entertainment industry that made Dennis a mid-century literary sensation. The cast of characters here is more outrageous than perhaps any of his other books, yet at the same time eminently sympathetic in all their frailties (even the con man gets a Get Out Of Jail Free card at the novel's end). And in the character of Leander Starr, the narcissist whose delusions of solvency drive forward the plot, Dennis managed to prove his stuff by concocting a egomaniac who is undeniably dreadful in every respect . . . and yet commands a reader's concern.
Dennis's best satires, vicious though they can be, have a juicy humanist core; none of them is juicier than Genius.
Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son
by Anne Lamott, Sam Lamott
3 Stars
Midway through Lamott's latest memoir, the author visits India, where she's assaulted by a flurry of new sensations, strange customs, and quirky oddities of a type that bring out her natural sense of good humor. Sigh. I wish the entire book had been about India.
Because save for that colorful (and too-brief) interlude, the rest of Some Assembly Required is a chronicle of the birth and first year of Lamott's grandchild. It's territory she's covered before, and better, in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. While there's a lesson to be learned in Lamott's experience as a grandmother—namely that the baby's not hers, and she has to learn not to expect it to be—there's really not much to say about babies here that she hadn't already explored.
And because much of the book takes place against a background of rancor between Lamott's own son, Sam, and his girlfriend Amy, it's often an uncomfortable read. Writing about the intimate details of a young couple's disintegrating relationship at a volatile flashpoint seems intrusive, and even slightly exploitative; it made me wish several times that grandma would take another vacation and leave the squabbling young parents alone.
Paradise
by Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
When I first started reading the novels of Patrick Dennis in my teens, Paradise—the story of twenty strangers in a vacation guest house, on a peninsula in Acapulco that becomes an island after a freak earthquake—was one I returned to again and again. I'd not read it in some thirty-odd years, though, and when I was scanning through the book's early chapters, I kept thinking, Why in the world did I like this novel? The characters are so VICIOUS!
And they are. Dennis's island is a microcosm of the world at large, and it's populated by drunks, and has-beens, and perverts (by 1971 standards, anyway), and fakes, and snobs, and the pretentious, and that darling of Dennis's satirical pen, the self-deluded. With Patrick Dennis, one expects a little acidity; the set-up for Paradise is a whole barrel of the sourest lemons.
Yet part of Dennis's point is to see which of his nasty creations can be purified in the crucible of tragedy. In the face of extreme adversity and an uncertain future, the best of the characters rise to the occasion, shed their bad habits, and emerge triumphant. Those who do not face a humbling end. In that respect, Paradise is almost New Testament-like in conception and execution, with its assortment of drunks, hookers, crooks, and weirdos scampering into the kingdom of heaven, while the author's Pharisees are very politely denied entry.
That he was able to predict so accurately a particular type of reality television subgenre some forty years before it appeared on the networks shows how in-tune Dennis could be with the entertainment industry, and how prescient was his own cynicism. Paradise is very much a worthwhile read, but the peculiarly mean satire in this next-to-last of Dennis's novels is guaranteed to leave a sour taste on the tongue.
Guestward Ho!
by Patrick Dennis, Barbara Hooton
4 Stars
Although billed on the original cover as 'By Barbara Hooton as indiscreetly confided to Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame', it's pretty clear to any aficionado of Dennis that while the stories about opening and running a New Mexico dude ranch are all Babs', the writing is completely Dennis' own. It's a fact subtly reinforced in the credits of his later novels, when Guestward Ho! is always listed as 'By Patrick Dennis, with Barbara Hooton.'
Bill Hooton was a friend of the author's when they were both in the American Field Service during the war; when Bill married Barbara, and Pat married Louise, the two couples shared an apartment for a considerable time. It probably seemed a natural fit for Hooton and Dennis to collaborate upon a book, and capitalize upon a popular mid-century subgenre of humorous literature in which urban couples abandon the busy city for a more fulfilling, though comedy-prone, experience in the country. Frank Gilbreth Jr.'s Innside Nantucket, about a young couple running a vacation resort is a solid example of the type, but the movement probably had reached its apex with Betty McDonald's The Egg and I, the story of a young couple trying to raise chickens among a backdrop of mountains, drunk and disorderly neighbors, and comical Indians. (It's a genre reached its nadir when it was satirized on TV's Green Acres.)
Guestward Ho! appears almost to combine the best of Gilbreth and McDonald, with its story of a young couple running a vacation resort with a backdrop of mountains and surrounded by drunk and disorderly employees—although to its credit, it manages to leave the native Americans with their dignity intact. The book's not outrageously funny, though Dennis' sole foray into non-fiction does contain his trademark zingers and a huge cast of zanies. And if Hooton's not-so-ghostly ghostwriter manages to make her sound like every other strong and capable broad in Dennis' later repertoire of female characters—wry, clever, honest to a fault, slightly bitchy, and not suffering fools or bigots gladly—at least she's in good, strong company.
Tony
by Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
All the usual targets of Patrick Dennis' vicious satire are lined up like clay ducks in his 1966 novel, Tony. Written in episodic form, like Auntie Mame, and featuring an immoral antihero like Leander Starr of Genius, Tony aims for and shoots down social climbers, Southern gentility, camp gay men, noxious boarding schools, pretentious graspers of all strata, and saves a special lead shot-packed salvo for the entire state of Connecticut.
However, it may be that modern readers might not warm to Dennis' rambling tale of Tony Vandenberg and his hunger for social elevation at any expense, nor of his decades-long friendship—if it can be called that—with the book's nameless narrator. Although readers cheer for another of Dennis' amoral creations, Leander Starr in the similarly-themed Genius, it's because Starr, despite his human frailties and abundant flaws, despite his willingness to tromp over friends and family alike in his quest to film the perfect movie, manages to create something bigger and better than himself. Tony Vandenberg never does, and what's more, never cares to; instead he leaves a wake of destruction throughout his life. The chilly and judgmental narrator is scarcely better—he's too flawed to keep his distance from Tony, but not enough of a friend either to help him in his schemes, or to betray him for his own good.
Still, Tony is on point when it comes to the skewering of its targets. Trenchant in tone and compulsively readable, its depiction of an at-times charming sociopath is perhaps more extreme than any other single novel Dennis wrote, but it also contains one of his most pitiable and outrageous fictional depictions. The novel leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, but it's also a well-written read that's more affecting in spots than the majority of Dennis' work.
The Loving Couple
by Virginia Rowans, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
The Loving Couple is the third of four novels by Patrick Dennis (Edward Everett Tanner III) written under the pseudonym of Virginia Rowans. Upon its publication, it became a bestseller at the same time as Dennis’ Auntie Mame and Guestward Ho!, making Patrick Dennis the first author ever to have three books simultaneously on the bestseller list.
The Loving Couple—which contrary to the title, is about the disintegration of the marriage between young suburban marrieds—is written as two separate novellas, both covering the same twenty-four hours in the disintegration of a suburban marriage. The two tales were published back-to-back started from each end of the book, so that when a reader had completed one side of the story, he could flip the book around and upside-down and consume the other half.
"His Story" details nearly twenty-four hours in the life of the young husband after he storms out of his nearly six-year marriage, as he spends a day coping with shabby college friends and a men's club he's long outgrown, his vulgar and tasteless employers, and a starlet as ravenous as she is without morals. "Her Story" begins the moment the husband has slammed the door behind him, and the wife finds herself fending off the sympathies of her superior older sister, the unfortunate interest of a man-hungry neighbor, and the attentions of a Southern gigolo on the make. The two stories meet, tangle, and climax in the nightclubs and streets of a mid-century Manhattan that's decidedly seedier and more piss-elegant than what's succeeded it.
Although he's writing under a pseudonym (a pseudonym that's different from his Patrick Dennis pseudonym, anyway), Dennis is aiming some of his most highly-corrosive satire at his usual targets in The Loving Couple. The suburbia of Westchester County comes under fire, but so do the residents of Manhattan, and more especially those of Queens and New Jersey. He sends poison jabs in the directions of television, and advertising, and kitsch-obsessed America; his fascination with and derision for sexually-ambiguous young men motivates a huge chunk of both novellas' plots. So acid is Dennis in this particular volume that I suspect most readers will only find appealing the Loving Couple of its title because the rest of the book's characters are so awful that the separated suburbanites smell sweet only in comparison.
But the book is funny, and razor-sharp in its insights. It's a shame The Loving Couple is barely known even to aficionados of Dennis, because it's a clever and ambitious conceit—and to his credit, he pulls it off.
House Party
by Virginia Rowans, Patrick Dennis
5 Stars
House Party, Patrick Dennis' second published book, and the second book released (in 1955) under his feminine pen name of Virginia Rowans, is very much the work of a young author testing his literary wings. There are multiple technically awkward passages—particularly in the early sections of the novel—in which solitary characters speak their thoughts aloud, soliloquizing their back stories in a way that no real people ever do. There's also a raw and optimistic idealism at work in the early House Party that all but vanishes in Dennis' later, infinitely more cynical works.
True, it's a brand of mid-century idealism unique to its time, in which Progress and the Bright New Future is typified (without irony!) as the bulldozing of historic homes, dividing up the land, and turning it into a subdivision of tract houses. It's a naive form of idealism in which young moderns frankly discuss Sex . . . though none of them are actually having any, nor intend to until blessed by holy matrimony. And the book can be almost bafflingly politically incorrect by modern standards; the help (whether African-American, or Irish, or German) are all treated as cardboard comic conceits, the environmental commercialization of rural real estate is appalling, and there's a terrible scene in which one man takes a hairbrush to a female's backside for a thorough spanking, just because he thinks she deserves it. In these regards, House Party is very much a product of its time.
The novel uses one of Dennis' frequently-employed conceits, as in Paradise or Genius or How Firm A Foundation, in which he strands a huge cast of characters in a closed-off location, and lets their comic personalities drive the action. In this case, a dozen and more zanies descend upon the Pruitt clan's Long Island estate for a holiday weekend, and the results are genuinely and consistently comic. The Whitman's Sampler of personalities is familiar to anyone who's read other Dennis books—a young gigolo, a cold-hearted gold-digger, a hyper-masculine military fraud, a senior citizen floozy, a flaming elderly queen, and a number of clean-cut midwestern boys who are examples of American Democracy, and staunch young women with good heads on their shoulders. It's not difficult, in the early stages of the work, to puzzle out which bright young thing will end up paired with whom by the tale's end. Watching the machinations play out against the barrage of comic situations, however, provides most of the book's pleasure.
There's a depth of feeling at work that distinguishes House Party from later, drier novels; Dennis could never be accused of sentimental writing, but House Party veers closest to it. There are such a number of good eggs among the Pruitt clan, and they're so deftly realized, that it's almost easy to overlook what modern readers might find as the novel's political flaws. It has an essential sweetness that is unique among Dennis' novels. That alone makes it a stand-out entry in the author's library.
When You Were Me
by Robert Rodi
1 Star
When You Were Me is a body-swap comedy. But here's the thing about body-swap comedies—and one of my published novels is one of them, so I can speak with a little authority here—nobody really reads them in order to find out how the bodies get swapped. It can't happen in real life, you see, and the more an author tries to make the premise into something logical, something that can neatly be explained, the less it works. So Thorne Smith's Turnabout used a magical little statue that flips its married couple within a couple of chapters. Freaky Friday employed a masterful device in which the mother initiated the swap before the book's opening pages, but she doesn't intend to divulge how. Way to go, Mom!
When You Were Me's body swap doesn't take place until the halfway point of the book. Halfway through. That's a couple of hundred pages of the characters contemplating the body swap, researching the body swap, picking out someone to do the body swap, going to the physician's office to make sure the bodies are okay before the body swap, settling legal matters and cleaning up apartments before the body swap, and then finally going through the body swap in great detail. It may be a body swap comedy for an OCD audience of estate planners and contract lawyers, but no one else is having any fun.
Another thing about this particular subgenre of comic writing is that much of the tension between the newly-swapped individuals arises from their unwillingness to be in their new bodies. Jack and Corey, the two protagonists of Rodi's novel, however, are only too willing to switch—and it's because they're so full of self-loathing for what they perceive as wasted lives. Self-hatred isn't fun to read about in any form, and it's so distilled and bitter here that it's difficult to root for either of the idiots who get themselves into this mess.
By the time the body swap antics actually begin, they're rushed and haphazard; the book's climax is confusing and the denouement even more so. I've been a Robert Rodi fan since Fag Hag, and I've always been happy that he's continued to write novels and resist the siren call of television scripting. However, if When You Were Me is the author's anguished response to being dragged clawing and screaming over the threshold of his fiftieth year, it's made me thoroughly uncomfortable.
Body-swapping, it has a lot of. Comedy, not so much.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Adoption
About two weeks ago I had one of those days on which I could do was hug Fred and mourn the loss of Sarah last year, and Chloe the year before. The grief was so raw and recent that it came as something of a shock to realize that it had been a good six months since Sarah died in my arms.
The day seemed to have been a turning point of sorts. Before it, I wouldn’t in any way consider talk of adopting another cat. I wouldn’t hear of it, in fact. After that day, though, the prospect didn’t seem quite as painful. Since Sarah’s been gone, Fred—total sweetheart though she is—had been acting rather weird, as if she felt she had to make up double the kitty neurosis of her absent older companion. She started doing this weird thing in the mornings in which she’d jump on the mattress at six a.m., poke at me and whuff, then jump down—a couple of dozen times. She started walking around the house and talking to herself in that where is everybody? yowl, though she’d know full well I was sitting on the sofa. She became obsessive over a couple of lengths of extra-chunky yarn that she would carry around the house with her in her mouth, yowling all the while. She couldn’t even sleep at night unless the yarn was draped over Craig and I in decorative shapes of her own making.
So we figured it was time to look for a buddy for her.
We dipped our toes in the water kind of tentatively, by visiting an adoption event at a pet store in Port Chester. We’d decided going in that we preferred a female cat under a year old, but perhaps a little older than tiny kitten-age. The one cat who fit those criteria was an orange-and-white calico named Skittles, who was eight months old, tiny, and very sweet; she had an inquisitive way of looking around at all the other animals and people as we both held her purring, narrow frame in our arms. She’d been rescued from a high-kill pound in Kentucky and brought out here to a foster home. I melted a little more at the prospect of getting a cat like that into our household.
But it was the day before Easter, and we both were going to be out of the house for most of the next day, and it didn’t seem right to adopt the first cat we saw and then just leave it. So we looked elsewhere, the rest of the week.
We went to an animal shelter in Norwalk a couple of days later. It was a giant complex where they wouldn’t even talk to us until we’d filled out one of those long questionnaires I’ve seen at other shelters that are full of well-meaning—but ultimately invasive—questions. Questions of a sort like, How much would you be willing to spend on your adopted pet in the case of a medical emergency? or May we visit your home to screen it prior to adoption? that make me want to scrawl down profanity-laden responses like my checking account is none of your goddamned business and oh hell no. They subjected us to a lengthy interview in a room full of teddybear cats so full of good will and trust and love that they would’ve curled up on Mussolini’s lap with no qualms, no doubt to see how we interacted with them, and then asked what I thought were a series of really insensitive questions about how our previous cats died.
I get that they’re trying to match their pets with people who aren’t going to abandon them and who will give them a good home, but damn. If my cat was 22 and died of old age, why do I have to go into detail about her last few minutes? Back off already.
Finally, grudgingly, they took us to see some of their adoptable cats. But they did it in the way our real estate agent showed us houses, a dozen years back. We said we wanted to a two-story three-bedroom house in Royal Oak, and he’d take us to a two-bedroom ranch in Southfield. We’d repeat what we wanted, and he’d show us a one-bedroom condo in Ferndale. We’d asked to see friendly young female cats under a year old, and the cats we saw were all mostly ten, male, and were so feral they’d run behind the cat furniture and hiss and hide whenever we entered the room.
We tried our vet, since that had worked when we’d gotten, but they didn’t have anything. Then last Friday, we drove to Long Island to visit the North Shore Animal Shelter, which was supposed to be huge. It was. It’s an entire complex with a vet school, a shelter, a cat domicile, and a pet supplies store. And the place was packed with dogs of all sorts—but only maybe twenty cats, all of them older, and all of them marked ‘Best as only cat’ on their cages.
There was one cat there whom we liked, a young tom named Lenny. Lenny was beautiful—he was a soft red color. In his cage, he was sweet and friendly and narrowed his eyes at us in an inviting way. Lenny had been dyed pink, either by pranksters or by his previous owners. The dye couldn’t be washed out, so Lenny looked a little bit like a punk from the nineteen-eighties at various angle, when suddenly he’d have the hue of a luridly-glazed doughnut. We liked Lenny a lot . . . until we got him out of his cage. At that point he was all screw you, SUCKAHS! and started running for the exits, and then started biting and clawing anyone who’d attempt to restrain him. When I put him back into his cage, he got a death grip on my right hand with all four paws and his piranha jaws. It took a good five minutes to detach him, and once they had, my hand looked like I’d thrust it into a running lawn mower.
So that was discouraging.
Then Saturday we went back to the pet store where we’d been the week before, since they were supposed to have another adoption event. Kentucky Skittles was still there. So we adopted her. Full circle, in a way.
We renamed Skittles as Ruby, and she’s a sweetheart. She stepped out of her carrier and investigated the house with a hungry curiosity. She proved right out of the box to be an excellent fetcher, tirelessly chasing after toys and scraps of paper, picking them up with her teeth, and then dropping them at our feet. She cuddles and purrs, and loves to look out of the windows. She’s taken over the top of the grand piano, across which she likes to sprawl like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. What more could you want in a cat?
Fred was not happy at first about the new addition to the family. She spent most of Saturday atop a dresser, balefully glaring at Ruby and growling the feline equivalent of Don’t come near me, Kentucky trailer trash. Things changed the next morning when Fred observed Ruby playing a good long game of Fetch with me. By last night, they were playing with each other like old buddies, and this morning they were eating side by side peaceably.
It’ll work out just fine.
The day seemed to have been a turning point of sorts. Before it, I wouldn’t in any way consider talk of adopting another cat. I wouldn’t hear of it, in fact. After that day, though, the prospect didn’t seem quite as painful. Since Sarah’s been gone, Fred—total sweetheart though she is—had been acting rather weird, as if she felt she had to make up double the kitty neurosis of her absent older companion. She started doing this weird thing in the mornings in which she’d jump on the mattress at six a.m., poke at me and whuff, then jump down—a couple of dozen times. She started walking around the house and talking to herself in that where is everybody? yowl, though she’d know full well I was sitting on the sofa. She became obsessive over a couple of lengths of extra-chunky yarn that she would carry around the house with her in her mouth, yowling all the while. She couldn’t even sleep at night unless the yarn was draped over Craig and I in decorative shapes of her own making.
So we figured it was time to look for a buddy for her.
We dipped our toes in the water kind of tentatively, by visiting an adoption event at a pet store in Port Chester. We’d decided going in that we preferred a female cat under a year old, but perhaps a little older than tiny kitten-age. The one cat who fit those criteria was an orange-and-white calico named Skittles, who was eight months old, tiny, and very sweet; she had an inquisitive way of looking around at all the other animals and people as we both held her purring, narrow frame in our arms. She’d been rescued from a high-kill pound in Kentucky and brought out here to a foster home. I melted a little more at the prospect of getting a cat like that into our household.
But it was the day before Easter, and we both were going to be out of the house for most of the next day, and it didn’t seem right to adopt the first cat we saw and then just leave it. So we looked elsewhere, the rest of the week.
We went to an animal shelter in Norwalk a couple of days later. It was a giant complex where they wouldn’t even talk to us until we’d filled out one of those long questionnaires I’ve seen at other shelters that are full of well-meaning—but ultimately invasive—questions. Questions of a sort like, How much would you be willing to spend on your adopted pet in the case of a medical emergency? or May we visit your home to screen it prior to adoption? that make me want to scrawl down profanity-laden responses like my checking account is none of your goddamned business and oh hell no. They subjected us to a lengthy interview in a room full of teddybear cats so full of good will and trust and love that they would’ve curled up on Mussolini’s lap with no qualms, no doubt to see how we interacted with them, and then asked what I thought were a series of really insensitive questions about how our previous cats died.
I get that they’re trying to match their pets with people who aren’t going to abandon them and who will give them a good home, but damn. If my cat was 22 and died of old age, why do I have to go into detail about her last few minutes? Back off already.
Finally, grudgingly, they took us to see some of their adoptable cats. But they did it in the way our real estate agent showed us houses, a dozen years back. We said we wanted to a two-story three-bedroom house in Royal Oak, and he’d take us to a two-bedroom ranch in Southfield. We’d repeat what we wanted, and he’d show us a one-bedroom condo in Ferndale. We’d asked to see friendly young female cats under a year old, and the cats we saw were all mostly ten, male, and were so feral they’d run behind the cat furniture and hiss and hide whenever we entered the room.
We tried our vet, since that had worked when we’d gotten, but they didn’t have anything. Then last Friday, we drove to Long Island to visit the North Shore Animal Shelter, which was supposed to be huge. It was. It’s an entire complex with a vet school, a shelter, a cat domicile, and a pet supplies store. And the place was packed with dogs of all sorts—but only maybe twenty cats, all of them older, and all of them marked ‘Best as only cat’ on their cages.
There was one cat there whom we liked, a young tom named Lenny. Lenny was beautiful—he was a soft red color. In his cage, he was sweet and friendly and narrowed his eyes at us in an inviting way. Lenny had been dyed pink, either by pranksters or by his previous owners. The dye couldn’t be washed out, so Lenny looked a little bit like a punk from the nineteen-eighties at various angle, when suddenly he’d have the hue of a luridly-glazed doughnut. We liked Lenny a lot . . . until we got him out of his cage. At that point he was all screw you, SUCKAHS! and started running for the exits, and then started biting and clawing anyone who’d attempt to restrain him. When I put him back into his cage, he got a death grip on my right hand with all four paws and his piranha jaws. It took a good five minutes to detach him, and once they had, my hand looked like I’d thrust it into a running lawn mower.
So that was discouraging.
Then Saturday we went back to the pet store where we’d been the week before, since they were supposed to have another adoption event. Kentucky Skittles was still there. So we adopted her. Full circle, in a way.
We renamed Skittles as Ruby, and she’s a sweetheart. She stepped out of her carrier and investigated the house with a hungry curiosity. She proved right out of the box to be an excellent fetcher, tirelessly chasing after toys and scraps of paper, picking them up with her teeth, and then dropping them at our feet. She cuddles and purrs, and loves to look out of the windows. She’s taken over the top of the grand piano, across which she likes to sprawl like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. What more could you want in a cat?
Fred was not happy at first about the new addition to the family. She spent most of Saturday atop a dresser, balefully glaring at Ruby and growling the feline equivalent of Don’t come near me, Kentucky trailer trash. Things changed the next morning when Fred observed Ruby playing a good long game of Fetch with me. By last night, they were playing with each other like old buddies, and this morning they were eating side by side peaceably.
It’ll work out just fine.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Welcome, New Instagram Users!
iPhone owners have been using the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, for over a year and a half. Last week, Instagram opened its doors for the first time to users on the Android platform.
It was nice to see a bunch of my friends—both those with Android smartphones and some laggards with iPhones who finally downloaded the app because of all the publicity—join the free service and begin posting. Personally, I don’t give a fig about platform wars. They’re boring, and shrill, and pointless. Anyone who takes and share fun photos is always welcome in my playground.
I’ve been an Instagram fan for a year. When I first downloaded the app, though, I didn’t get the point. “I can already share photos on Facebook,” I thought to myself. Or, “I could join Flickr if I wanted to do that.” True enough—and it may be that those services or something else might be more attractive to you. But I became an Instagram addict when I realized the following simple facts.
1. Instagram is not about the filters.
Whenever the popular press or technology writers attempt to describe the service to people who’ve never heard of it before, they talk about Instagram’s photo filters—some various effects and frames that can give your photos different looks. They range from sepia tones to black and white, from overexposed to dark and murky. The use (and abuse) of these various filters generates a lot of derision from holier-than-thou types who like to sneer about how real photographers don’t have to doctor their shots with hipster Instagram filters, and from websites who assume that the filters are all there is to the app, and recommend alternative software to users who want to apply effects to their photos.
There are plenty of other apps and software that will do a hell of a lot better with effects than Instagram. I edit my photos with effects, but out of the hundreds of photos I’ve posted there, I’ve used Instagram’s filters maybe twice. Very few people I know use them at all.
And that’s because Instagram is not about filters. Use them if they amuse you, but know that the service’s real strength is in the social aspect. That is, the sharing of photos, and finding others with similar interests—even if it’s just for a fleeting moment.
Immediacy is one of Instagram’s strengths. Last winter, Craig went into the city one afternoon and was bewildered when he started seeing people dressed up as Santa all around him. Thronging Grand Central Terminal. In the subways. On the streets. We figured out quickly enough that it had to do something with the annual SantaCon event—but I got to enjoy it remotely, at home, by looking at photos tagged with #santa or #santacon hashtags. There were hundreds of photos from various people in various states of bewilderment not only in New York, but in the major metropolitan centers around the world, snapping and posting photos of Santas.
Sure, I might’ve seen that on Facebook. (Though I didn’t.) I might’ve seen it on Flickr eventually. When you’ve got hundreds of people armed with cell phones with good cameras posting photos as it happens, though, Instagram becomes a fun and powerful place.
But you might not realize that until you glom onto the fact that. . . .
2. Instagram is infinitely more enjoyable with hashtags and geotagging.
Hashtags—that is, affixing a classifying word with a # symbol—are what make Instagram go ‘round. It’s possible to post your lovely photo of the Empire State Building onto your photo stream and have your handful of friends admire it, but no one else is going to find it without a few hashtags. If you added #empirestatebuilding in the comment, people who are looking for shots of that iconic building are suddenly going to see it. If you go whole hog and throw in some New York City tags as well—#manhattan #nyc #newyork #ny—you’re widening your audience even more.
There are people who are going to want to look at #architecture shots. If you caught the skyscraper against a particularly awesome cloud formation, there are bunches of Instagrammers who love #cloud or #sky or #cloudporn shots. There are even specialized tags like #lookup (nothing but shots of people pointing their cameras upward, for some often-surprising perspectives) and #buildinglover (for people who love taking or looking at photographs of buildings). They’re fun to explore. I’ve spent hours looking at #rustporn.
When I’m browsing photos, I often enjoy looking at other people’s shots of places and things I’ve experienced. I enjoy looking at shots of my alma mater with the #williamandmary tag, for example, and I like to moon over shots with the #detroit and #royaloak tags. Detroit has a particularly good set of Instagram aficionados who post shots under the #igersdetroit tag—your locality might, too, and they might even sponsor particularly fun events in which they’ll all get together for a photo walk, or similar social/photography events.
If you want to look at cheesecake, investigate tags like #beard or #muscle or #swimsuit or #tattoo. If you like animals, look at #cat or #dog or #pet or #penguin. Yes, there are over 22,000 photographs of penguins.
If you’ve got geotagging capabilities on your phone, use them. I find nothing more exciting than tagging a shot with the location that I took it, and then seeing what other photographs people have taken at the exact same location. If you’ve never been impressed by the infinite variety of the human imagination, you might be after you attempt that exercise.
I’m not one of those people who can take a daily shirtless shot of himself in the mirror, post it, and rely on a hundred people to hit the ‘like’ button. I tag stuff religiously. As appropriate, I tag the photo content, information about the location, special interest group tags, and I tag the apps I’ve used to edit my shots. I’ve made all kinds of new friends that way, and as I’ve learned how to write hashtags, the number of likes I’ve gotten on individual shots has climbed.
Which is all well and good, but keep in mind that. . . .
3. You cannot win Instagram.
It’s not a game. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s gratifying to get likes on your photos. It really is. It’s very gratifying to get a lot of likes on your photos. It is not going to change your life for the better, though, to get so obsessive that all you think about is getting people to click the little heart by your snapshots.
The goal should not be for you to get 20 likes per photo, or 50, or 100, or 1000. Your goal should not be to accumulate a thousand friends. Having a photo make the popular page is fun, but it’s not your goal, either.
You should be enjoying Instagram as a way to share your photos, and to look at what other people are doing with their cameras. You can see all kinds of amazing things you’d never see in your ordinary life, through your Instagram friends. That’s the reward. The likes and the rest are icing on a rather substantial cake.
4. As in real life, it's better to have too few Instagram friends rather than the wrong kind of Instagram friends.
It’s always gratifying when a stranger begins following you on Instagram. That warm, fuzzy feeling of someone enjoying your shots enough to want to seem them every time you post them—priceless.
There are, however, people on the service who are ignoring my third guideline. They think they can win at Instagram, and the plan to do so by friending anyone and everyone. You can tell who these people are pretty easily. They haven’t liked a single one of your photos, even though they’ve added you to their friends list. Typically they have only a handful of photos on their profiles, and they’re following thousands and thousands of people—or else their follower-to-following ratio is highly skewed, as in they have only 33 followers, but they’re following 15,000 people.
Often these folk are fifteen-year-old schoolgirls from Sweden. Or fourteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirls. They are often narcissists who post photos of nothing but themselves.
These people may follow you, but they are never going to look at your photos or give them likes. They’re known as ‘ghost followers.’ They attempt to up their own following—and thus the number of likes they get—by befriending anyone.
They are a waste of your time, and you don’t want them as friends. Get them off your followers list immediately by blocking them, and then unblocking them. That way, if they genuinely want to see your photos, they’ll find their way back.
Instagram uses an algorithm in its assessment for the most popular photos that’s highly-guarded and very mysterious, but the number of followers one has plays into the calculation. If you have hundreds of ghost followers, it’s going to stymie your photo’s chance ever of making the popular page. Plus, I just genuinely get grumpy at ghost followers.
If you want to use a service to get rid of them for you, use a search engine to find IGExorcist or another similar site. They’ll automate the purge of followers who never interact with you.
Generally I find the Twitter paradigm applicable to Instagram. On Twitter, if someone follows me, I will follow them back if I know them personally, or if I find them interesting. If someone follows me on Twitter who’s spammy, or boring, or just plain irrelevant to my interests, I feel no compulsion to follow them. On Twitter, I don’t get my nose out of joint if I’m following someone famous or popular and they don’t follow me.
My advice on Instagram is to follow who you like, and don’t stress out if they don’t follow you back.
However, and maybe even most importantly. . . .
5. Instagram is most enjoyable when one explores and takes chances with strangers.
If you like someone’s photograph, hit the heart button and like it. People love it when others like their photos. If you really like it, tell them so with a quick comment! Then check out the rest of their photo stream to see if you enjoy their other shots. If so, follow them, and keep following them as long as you’re enjoying the ride.
Day-to-day shots of people’s lunches, feet, and rumpled bedclothes don’t mean much in themselves, but the stories that people tell about their lives with a timeline of photographs can be incredible. I follow the feeds of talented photographers grappling with recovery issues, of men and women whose work takes them to exotic corners of the world, of parents grappling with the severe disabilities of their children. I follow some people whose shots are so quirky and odd that I can tell what type of sense of humor they have, right off, without having ever spoken to them.
I follow an aspiring film actor in Spain, and an established television actor in Los Angeles. I follow a blues guitarist in Georgia, and an introspective bodybuilder in Greece. I follow someone who crafts exquisite photos of the countryside of Norway, and other stylists who take nothing but macro shots of flowers that transcend the mundane. I follow people I’ve never met who live in my home town. I follow people whose sole aim in life seems to be taking pretty shots of their pretty selves in front of the mirror, day after day.There’s room in my life for all of that.
But the most unique thing about the service is that in the year I’ve used it, I’ve never once encountered rudeness. I’m sure it’s out there—I’m sure there are prickly people who insult others, or trolls looking to generate response with shock and profanity. They likely won’t last long. Because in my personal experience, no matter what comment I’ve made or whose photo I’ve liked, or however different from me someone is when I interact with them, I’ve only gotten kindness, thanks, and positive vibes.
In an internet culture that seems to thrive on snark and irony and negativity, that’s what makes Instagram different for me, and that’s why I keep going back.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Rosemary and Thyme
I mentioned recently that Netflix, in its attempt to focus my attention solely on those of its offerings it feels would appeal to me, has created several categories of television shows and movies to capture my attention. They often seem remarkably specialized, as when it collects together Goofy Musicals or 1970s Sitcoms with a Strong Female Lead. Sometimes, it seems almost a little too specialized, as when the service offers up Campy Comedies Featuring Cross-Dressing Stars, or Cerebral Dramas with Exquisite Cinematography Set on Wind-Swept Moors and Cast with Actors Sporting Impenetrable Accents.
And then other times, it'll gather up Hot in Cleveland and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas and Xena: Warrior Princess and old episodes of Top Chef and lump them in a category called Aw, Who the Hell Are We Kidding? We Know You'll Watch Anything.
But Netflix does seem to have glommed onto the fact that my favorite of these categories it creates is a little something called Holy Crap Even Gwyneth Paltrow Speaking with a British Accent Will Get You Going, Won't It, You Bloody Anglophile? After my excursion into bodice-and-bustle territory with the breathless Lillie, an interminable biography of British professional hussy Lillie Langtry, I naturally segued into related territory with Edward the King, a thirteen-part miniseries about the lives and times of King Edward VII, whose major life accomplishments seem to have been not taking the throne because Queen Victoria decided to live a very long life simply to spite him, and not being riddled with syphillis.
During the first eleven episodes, Edward the King was a ripping watch—simply because Annette Crosbie's turn as Queen Victoria was so positively unhinged that every time she was on the screen, I'd stop whatever I was doing, just in case she started screaming like a banshee. The last two episodes, it was mostly a crabby King Edward coughing and hacking up phlegm.
I was also treated during the run to another example of one of my unfavorite trends of these nineteen-seventies period productions, the casting of (shall we discreetly say) an Actress Of A Certain Mature Number Of Years as a teenaged-girl. I was appalled by it when thirty-two-year-old Francesca Annis was bustin' out all over as fourteen-year-old Lillie Langtry. So I wasn't all that happy in Edward the King when in the second or third episode I saw then-thirty-year-old British TV favorite Felicity Kendal show up wearing a massive hoop skirt, in pigtails, and murmur in a simpering voice something like, "But mama, I know you are the Queen yet I cannot bring myself to marry the future Emperor Frederick III of Germany for he is a man of advanced years and I am but a tender reed of sixteen."
Which had me drop everything I was doing and to glare at the screen and yell, "Oh, come on."
Like Francesca Annis, Felicity Kendal is another of my childhood favorites. She was charm personified in the BBC sitcom The Good Life, which ran on U.S. PBS stations in the nineteen-seventies as Good Neighbors. You remember it! It was about the Goods, a suburban couple who decide to become self-sufficient. Richard Briers played Tom, who was gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal played Barbara, who mucked about in the gardens and was winsome and adorable and who, when she was frightened or angry, made high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she was Very Serious, would pull on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
Well! When I saw that Netflix was carrying the horticultural amateur detectives series from the mid-2000s, Rosemary and Thyme, which also stars Kendal, I had to watch it it. I missed it the first time 'round, somehow. It's about a couple of women who decide to become detectives. It stars Pam Ferris as Thyme, who is gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal plays Barbara—excuse me, Rosemary—who mucks about in gardens and is winsome and adorable and who, when she is about to be bludgeoned by the murderer-of-the-week, makes high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she's Very Serious And Investigating A Clue, pulls on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
The two shows are very different from each other.
You see, every week, Tom and Barbara—I'm sorry, Thyme and Rosemary—head out to a posh residence, or boarding school, or resort spa, where a bunch of toffs mill about, spouting off vague threats to each other that later will be consider Hard Evidence For Murder by the local constabulary. Someone dies, Tom and Barbara—sorry, 'Rosemary'—decide they're better-equipped to nose into it than the police, and they proceed to ask so many irritating and unsubtle questions ("Lady Worthington-Smythe, exactly how much do you know about the creation of untraceable poisons from common household ingredients? Oh, no reason. Just making polite conversation!") that five minutes before the show's over, the writers just bring about a hasty conclusion by having the murderer get so irritated that he attempts to kill one of the pair.
This is usually when my interest perks up.
But no. The killers' attempts to bring down Tom and Barbara—let's just stick with those names, since I'm more comfortable with them—always fail. Instead of trying to make getaways, like gauche Americans or the lower classes might, the killers then stand about and confess everything in front of the police, because apparently that's what they do in the United Kingdom, being jolly good sports about being foiled and all.
The level of detective work involved in a typical Rosemary and Thyme installment isn't exactly Encyclopedia Brown-level. Hell, Encyclopedia Brown would roll his eyes at this crap and outsource his services to Scooby-Doo and company. If someone has an alibi like "I was with dear mummy in Little Cruddington watching a world-famous Polish pianist perform," Barbara is sure to stumble across a copy of The Little Cruddington Gazette with a (I'm not kidding!) three-inch headline typeface declaiming, WORLD-FAMOUS POLISH PIANIST CANCELS TONIGHT'S CONCERT!!! The killers magically forget to roll down their sleeves and keep covered the tattoos that link them to the special military forces that are the only known folk trained to use a special death-grip that leaves no marks about the throat.
Hell. Most of the time the plot's such a muddled mess that Tom and Barbara figure out absolutely nothing, and it's only the murderer inevitable denouement monologue that sorts everything out. Yes, it's a sloppy and appalling show . . . but I can't stop watching it.
Part of my fascination with Rosemary and Thyme is how academic an exercise it is to the writers. The cozy mystery is a genre I've enjoyed since I first read a Miss Marple novel, and it's obvious that the writers want this show to be a part of that tradition. In most cozies, though, the murder is disruptive; it tears apart the community and lays bare its secrets.
In Rosemary and Thyme, murder and violence barely go noticed. When Barbara has a former student who throws himself (or DID he?) off of a balcony and is writhing in pain, near death, on a carefully-tended gravel path, his fiancee and brother and Barbara all show up at the sound of impact. But where normal people would be shouting Oh my GOD someone call an ambulance!, the fiancee and brother just stand around for a bit and have a Conversation Full of Potential Clues, while Kendal's character lurks behind a hedge and eavesdrops, adorably. No concern for the injured bloke whatsoever. Not a blip. Also, at the end of every episode, after Tom and Barbara have 'solved'—and I use the word loosely—the mystery, they'll exchange japes with the widow or widower and everyone will laaaaaaugh, just like they used to when Barbara would say something endearingly silly at the end of The Good Life. Never mind that someone JUST GOT SHOT AND KILLED the night before. That's all water under the bridge to these people.
Even though the show's based on violent acts taking place, they're all so muffled and muted by the cozy comforts of country living that they vanish the moment they're over. I was watching an episode in which the killer snuck up on Barbara as she puttered around with test tubes and a microscope or something (I don't know. She's supposed to have a scientific mind, even though she can't remember to call an ambulance when someone drops off a high balcony) and proceeded to attempt to strangle her with piano wire, which naturally made me root for him to succeed. But no, a kindly caretaker hits the murderer over the head with an old framed photograph, causing him to collapse to the floor in a heap.
And does the caretaker say anything like, Cor blimey, what was that chap doing to you, Mistress Barbara? No. He says, "Good thing I was stopping by with this framed photograph to help you solve the mystery of the withering grass on the estate grounds, ma'am!"
And does Barbara say anything like, Thank GOD you arrived to SAVE MY LIFE! This man has murdered twice in the last two days! Help me restrain him quickly while he's still unconscious before he can leap to his feet and attempt to murder us both . . . again . . . and let's call the constable? Oh heck no. She pulls out her oversized glasses and says, in quite a normal tone, "Oh, how fehscinating. Let's have a look."
Then the murderer leaps to his feet and attempts to murder them both . . . again.
Idiots.
As I said, I can't stop watching. Perhaps picking on a television show that's long passed its expiration date is a little like shooting tuna in a rather small bucket of water, but it's hard not to have an affection for something the creators were obviously banking upon to appeal to a somewhat mature, if not outright decrepit, demographic that has fond memories of Kendal from thirty-five years ago. Myself included.
Even so. Whenever the killer of the week gets Barbara—fine, whatever—'Rosemary' by the throat, I'm the first to be shouting out at the television, "Need a hand with that?!"
And then other times, it'll gather up Hot in Cleveland and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas and Xena: Warrior Princess and old episodes of Top Chef and lump them in a category called Aw, Who the Hell Are We Kidding? We Know You'll Watch Anything.
But Netflix does seem to have glommed onto the fact that my favorite of these categories it creates is a little something called Holy Crap Even Gwyneth Paltrow Speaking with a British Accent Will Get You Going, Won't It, You Bloody Anglophile? After my excursion into bodice-and-bustle territory with the breathless Lillie, an interminable biography of British professional hussy Lillie Langtry, I naturally segued into related territory with Edward the King, a thirteen-part miniseries about the lives and times of King Edward VII, whose major life accomplishments seem to have been not taking the throne because Queen Victoria decided to live a very long life simply to spite him, and not being riddled with syphillis.
During the first eleven episodes, Edward the King was a ripping watch—simply because Annette Crosbie's turn as Queen Victoria was so positively unhinged that every time she was on the screen, I'd stop whatever I was doing, just in case she started screaming like a banshee. The last two episodes, it was mostly a crabby King Edward coughing and hacking up phlegm.
I was also treated during the run to another example of one of my unfavorite trends of these nineteen-seventies period productions, the casting of (shall we discreetly say) an Actress Of A Certain Mature Number Of Years as a teenaged-girl. I was appalled by it when thirty-two-year-old Francesca Annis was bustin' out all over as fourteen-year-old Lillie Langtry. So I wasn't all that happy in Edward the King when in the second or third episode I saw then-thirty-year-old British TV favorite Felicity Kendal show up wearing a massive hoop skirt, in pigtails, and murmur in a simpering voice something like, "But mama, I know you are the Queen yet I cannot bring myself to marry the future Emperor Frederick III of Germany for he is a man of advanced years and I am but a tender reed of sixteen."
Which had me drop everything I was doing and to glare at the screen and yell, "Oh, come on."
Like Francesca Annis, Felicity Kendal is another of my childhood favorites. She was charm personified in the BBC sitcom The Good Life, which ran on U.S. PBS stations in the nineteen-seventies as Good Neighbors. You remember it! It was about the Goods, a suburban couple who decide to become self-sufficient. Richard Briers played Tom, who was gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal played Barbara, who mucked about in the gardens and was winsome and adorable and who, when she was frightened or angry, made high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she was Very Serious, would pull on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
Well! When I saw that Netflix was carrying the horticultural amateur detectives series from the mid-2000s, Rosemary and Thyme, which also stars Kendal, I had to watch it it. I missed it the first time 'round, somehow. It's about a couple of women who decide to become detectives. It stars Pam Ferris as Thyme, who is gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal plays Barbara—excuse me, Rosemary—who mucks about in gardens and is winsome and adorable and who, when she is about to be bludgeoned by the murderer-of-the-week, makes high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she's Very Serious And Investigating A Clue, pulls on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
The two shows are very different from each other.
You see, every week, Tom and Barbara—I'm sorry, Thyme and Rosemary—head out to a posh residence, or boarding school, or resort spa, where a bunch of toffs mill about, spouting off vague threats to each other that later will be consider Hard Evidence For Murder by the local constabulary. Someone dies, Tom and Barbara—sorry, 'Rosemary'—decide they're better-equipped to nose into it than the police, and they proceed to ask so many irritating and unsubtle questions ("Lady Worthington-Smythe, exactly how much do you know about the creation of untraceable poisons from common household ingredients? Oh, no reason. Just making polite conversation!") that five minutes before the show's over, the writers just bring about a hasty conclusion by having the murderer get so irritated that he attempts to kill one of the pair.
This is usually when my interest perks up.
But no. The killers' attempts to bring down Tom and Barbara—let's just stick with those names, since I'm more comfortable with them—always fail. Instead of trying to make getaways, like gauche Americans or the lower classes might, the killers then stand about and confess everything in front of the police, because apparently that's what they do in the United Kingdom, being jolly good sports about being foiled and all.
The level of detective work involved in a typical Rosemary and Thyme installment isn't exactly Encyclopedia Brown-level. Hell, Encyclopedia Brown would roll his eyes at this crap and outsource his services to Scooby-Doo and company. If someone has an alibi like "I was with dear mummy in Little Cruddington watching a world-famous Polish pianist perform," Barbara is sure to stumble across a copy of The Little Cruddington Gazette with a (I'm not kidding!) three-inch headline typeface declaiming, WORLD-FAMOUS POLISH PIANIST CANCELS TONIGHT'S CONCERT!!! The killers magically forget to roll down their sleeves and keep covered the tattoos that link them to the special military forces that are the only known folk trained to use a special death-grip that leaves no marks about the throat.
Hell. Most of the time the plot's such a muddled mess that Tom and Barbara figure out absolutely nothing, and it's only the murderer inevitable denouement monologue that sorts everything out. Yes, it's a sloppy and appalling show . . . but I can't stop watching it.
Part of my fascination with Rosemary and Thyme is how academic an exercise it is to the writers. The cozy mystery is a genre I've enjoyed since I first read a Miss Marple novel, and it's obvious that the writers want this show to be a part of that tradition. In most cozies, though, the murder is disruptive; it tears apart the community and lays bare its secrets.
In Rosemary and Thyme, murder and violence barely go noticed. When Barbara has a former student who throws himself (or DID he?) off of a balcony and is writhing in pain, near death, on a carefully-tended gravel path, his fiancee and brother and Barbara all show up at the sound of impact. But where normal people would be shouting Oh my GOD someone call an ambulance!, the fiancee and brother just stand around for a bit and have a Conversation Full of Potential Clues, while Kendal's character lurks behind a hedge and eavesdrops, adorably. No concern for the injured bloke whatsoever. Not a blip. Also, at the end of every episode, after Tom and Barbara have 'solved'—and I use the word loosely—the mystery, they'll exchange japes with the widow or widower and everyone will laaaaaaugh, just like they used to when Barbara would say something endearingly silly at the end of The Good Life. Never mind that someone JUST GOT SHOT AND KILLED the night before. That's all water under the bridge to these people.
Even though the show's based on violent acts taking place, they're all so muffled and muted by the cozy comforts of country living that they vanish the moment they're over. I was watching an episode in which the killer snuck up on Barbara as she puttered around with test tubes and a microscope or something (I don't know. She's supposed to have a scientific mind, even though she can't remember to call an ambulance when someone drops off a high balcony) and proceeded to attempt to strangle her with piano wire, which naturally made me root for him to succeed. But no, a kindly caretaker hits the murderer over the head with an old framed photograph, causing him to collapse to the floor in a heap.
And does the caretaker say anything like, Cor blimey, what was that chap doing to you, Mistress Barbara? No. He says, "Good thing I was stopping by with this framed photograph to help you solve the mystery of the withering grass on the estate grounds, ma'am!"
And does Barbara say anything like, Thank GOD you arrived to SAVE MY LIFE! This man has murdered twice in the last two days! Help me restrain him quickly while he's still unconscious before he can leap to his feet and attempt to murder us both . . . again . . . and let's call the constable? Oh heck no. She pulls out her oversized glasses and says, in quite a normal tone, "Oh, how fehscinating. Let's have a look."
Then the murderer leaps to his feet and attempts to murder them both . . . again.
Idiots.
As I said, I can't stop watching. Perhaps picking on a television show that's long passed its expiration date is a little like shooting tuna in a rather small bucket of water, but it's hard not to have an affection for something the creators were obviously banking upon to appeal to a somewhat mature, if not outright decrepit, demographic that has fond memories of Kendal from thirty-five years ago. Myself included.
Even so. Whenever the killer of the week gets Barbara—fine, whatever—'Rosemary' by the throat, I'm the first to be shouting out at the television, "Need a hand with that?!"
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Yelpaholics Anonymous
A year and more ago, when Craig and I were grappling with the reality that he'd just accepted a job in Connecticut and until our house sold would be moving here without me like, immediately, we made a couple of trips to this fair state in order to suss it out a little. Highly stressful trips they were, too, for the both of us. From our base at an off-ramp hotel, we had no idea how to get around, or where was good to visit and where was better to stay away. And when you come from Detroit—I love you, Detroit, but you know it's true—you learn that there are definitely areas of cities you avoid.
Worst of all, we had absolutely no idea where to eat. Now, usually when we're dining out, we handle it a little like this:
Under the high stress circumstances of relocation, however, these conversations would take on a slight edge:
I know that Yelp is not a newfangled web site that all the hep kids have suddenly started visiting. It's not now, it wasn't then. In fact, we'd known a couple of people who were admitted obsessive Yelp reviewers, an activity to which most of us would gently ignore in public, as if the hobbyists had confessed they'd taken up public masturbation as a suitable leisure pursuit.
We hadn't used Yelp much in Michigan because the midwest is largely the land of the chain restaurant, and really, does one need to consult a database in order to decide whether one Applebee's is better than the next? Connecticut is a state in which the seeds of chain restaurants find no purchase, however. There are hundreds upon hundreds of mom and pop restaurants, and there's plenty of fine dining, but there are remarkably few restaurant chains.
Unless you're Dunkin' Donuts, that is. Dunkin' Donuts franchises are the weeds that flourish even on salted, barren land, up here. I could tell you where one Dunkin' Donuts was in Michigan. One. And that's only because it was attached to a gas station. There are about thirty Dunkin' Donuts within a one-mile radius of me here, and they're building another two blocks down the street. Oh, and pretzel chains. Connecticut loves its hot pretzel chains. Dunkin' Donuts, if you ever come up with a pretzel-flavored donut for citizens of the Nutmeg State to dunk, you will have a hit on your hands of astronomical proportions.
You're welcome. I only ask for credit. And a small development fee.
But anyway. Yelp. I was hungry, and desperate, and so on my phone I punched in a request for a restaurant that was within a couple of miles and was cheap and served—yes—Mexican, and we ended up eating at a tiny little dive that had some really incredible food. It was so spicy I walked out with sweat marks on my back and on my thighs, but I like it like that. We used Yelp again for the other meals on those short trips. We'd look for a type of food, check out the reviews, and try the ones that seemed to be popular and get a lot of stars. It worked out well for us.
And it still does, since we continue to use the site to find places where we can grab a bite. It's especially handy when we head into Manhattan, with its bewildering abundance of choice. I find it generally easier to get a sense of what dishes are popular, of how much to expect to pay, and of whether or not I might like a place from reading through a dozen Yelp reviews, than I do from looking at a restaurant's website or accepting the word-of-mouth recommendations of local acquaintances.
If you sense there's a big but coming, you know me well. Because there's one thing about Yelp that really bugs me: I simply cannot stand many of its reviewers. We're talking about a small percentage here. Small, but super-irritating. I've noticed that a lot of Yelp reviewers provoke in me the same reaction I have when I hear someone is rubbing his hands all over an inflated latex balloon: I want to march over and make him stop. Preferably with a good slapping.
It's a phenomenon that seems almost endemic to this part of the country, too. When I was using Yelp back in Michigan, the reviews largely tended be along the lines of I like potatoes. This place serves good potatoes! The potatoes with cheese are good! The steak with cheese is great, and it comes with good potatoes! I really like the chicken with cheese too! I mean, throw a little cheese on something and the good people of Michigan are happy, simple folk who write happy, simple Yelp reviews as they loosen their belt buckles a notch.
But the East Coast Yelpers are complainers. A little bit of cheddar jack isn't going to distract them. Oh no. They're too savvy for your stinkin' dairyland legerdemain. They want to gripe about something, even if it's largely imaginary. In fact, many of them will complain without exactly knowing why, so there are a plethora of seemingly gentle, neutral reviews with a bit of a stinger at the end, like the two-star review of a coffee shop that reads:
One wonders what more the poor reviewer would require from a coffee shop to get him out of that malaise. A cotton candy machine? A Zoloft dispenser?
The worst breed of Yelp reviewer, though, is the Yelper with Attitude. They know everything about food, and they want you to know that they know it. And they're going to make sure you know it in their hundred-word Yelp review, damn your eyes. Yelp on the East Coast is full of reviewers who write mini-essays that are less about the restaurants in question, and more about the reviewers themselves, and their psychological dramas.
I'm usually all in favor when a person makes the broadest of statements about his qualifications for making sweeping judgments about a restaurant. I wouldn't bat an eye at someone saying, I eat a lot of Indian food and this place had some yummy stuff! I do, however, find my eyebrow arching and my hackles rising at something like:
Because that review is not really helpful. All it tells me is that the reviewer wants me to know he travels, that he spends a lot of money traveling and wants everyone to be aware of that fact, and that he is very concerned with the number of stars his hotel has received.
If I'm dining at Chip's Pancakes, which serves fifty-two varieties of pancakes (I've only worked my way through three, but I've got time and an elastic stomach), I can be sure that here in this area of the country, tucked among the many rapturous reviews from pancake lovers, will be one Yelper who declaims:
No, Yelper, you really shouldn't. We're talking about Chip's Pancakes, which advertises itself with big fat pictures of big fat flapjacks on monster-sized signs that loom over I-95. We're not discussing Le Bon Creperie du Fwahfwah down in the Meatpacking District. At the Creperie you can get your refined eating. At Chip's you get a big fat plate of big fat pancakes with a design made in them out of blueberries. Shove some in that bag fat piehole of yours and spare me.
This type of reviewer is the sort that will often go to great lengths to let others know exactly how well-educated he is, how sophisticated, and how truly attuned to excellence is his palate. You can smell 'em coming a mile away, especially when a review begins:
Oh yeah. These reviews sound like a blast to mock. And they are, for about the first dozen. But I get the impression that most of these self-absorbed reviewers are not the kind of people I'd want to hang out with. They just get nasty. They write irate, outraged, self-righteous reviews in which they admit they weren't dissatisfied with the prices, the decor, or the food itself, but because of some imagined slight that sent them into a tizzy—they were seated too near the kitchen, say. It seems instead of making a good faith effort to resolve the problem (like, by asking someone nicely, "Can we maybe get another table?"), the reviewer stews and sits stonily and is even more outraged when the wait staff don't notice their obvious, passive-aggressive displeasure.
Then he runs home and pounds out a scathing Yelp review, of course. Because that'll show 'em.
I've seen reviewers write exquisitely-detailed screeds about the disputes they'll have with restaurant owners and waiters that would make even the most die-hard proponent of the motto the customer is always right raise an eyebrow and admit, "Well, maybe except in this case." The amount of pride that some of these people take in stiffing their servers on a tip, or attempting to get them fired, makes me want to track down the reviewer in a restaurant, wait until they've ordered a hamburger, then ambush them and drop a loogie on top of the pickles and lettuce myself.
But even when they're not going to those extremes, up here the Yelpers always find something to complain about. The place in Hell's Kitchen that specializes in cramming homemade ice cream between homemade glazed doughnuts and then covering them with gooey syrups? It doesn't have healthy alternatives, one Yelp review will sniff. The fantastic ice cream shop down the street that serves exquisite little half-pint cups of gourmet ice cream layered with homemade cookie dough, in exotic flavor combinations, served with a little wooden paddle like they used to when I was in second grade? It lacks an attractive view from the front windows, says one Yelper with a lofty, two-star dismissal.
You know what, Yelpers? Moderate your expectations. Seriously. Find a healthier dessert place among the several hundred cluttering Hell's Kitchen. Resign yourself to the notion that a street-level storefront tucked among the residences on West 47th is not going to have the same view as a chi-chi place atop the Time-Warner Center. If the food sucks, fine. Tell me. If the service was truly rotten, I want to hear about it. But if you're more interested in informing me that you have impossible standards to which very little can match, I'm already yawning and rolling my eyes.
If Maria Callas were alive today, she wouldn't be teaching master classes. She'd be writing Yelp reviews.
Worst of all, we had absolutely no idea where to eat. Now, usually when we're dining out, we handle it a little like this:
CRAIG: Where do you want to eat?This conversation will go on for a half-hour or so in its own amiable, ambling little way, by the way, until finally we get into the car and go to the same Mexican restaurant we always patronize.
ME: I don't know. Where do you want to eat?
CRAIG: I don't have a preference. Where do you want to eat?
ME: I don't have a preference. What're you in the mood for?
CRAIG: I'm not in a mood for anything in particular. What do you want to eat?
Under the high stress circumstances of relocation, however, these conversations would take on a slight edge:
CRAIG: Where do you want to eat?Well. When we started coming to Connecticut, in order to avoid any more of that kind of thing (which was already spontaneously happening every twenty-three minutes), I turned to Yelp for a little assistance in finding places to dine.
ME: WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME? CAN'T YOU SEE I'M STRESSED?! AAAAIEEEEE!CRAIG: OH GOD I'M RUINING BOTH OUR LIVES!
I know that Yelp is not a newfangled web site that all the hep kids have suddenly started visiting. It's not now, it wasn't then. In fact, we'd known a couple of people who were admitted obsessive Yelp reviewers, an activity to which most of us would gently ignore in public, as if the hobbyists had confessed they'd taken up public masturbation as a suitable leisure pursuit.
We hadn't used Yelp much in Michigan because the midwest is largely the land of the chain restaurant, and really, does one need to consult a database in order to decide whether one Applebee's is better than the next? Connecticut is a state in which the seeds of chain restaurants find no purchase, however. There are hundreds upon hundreds of mom and pop restaurants, and there's plenty of fine dining, but there are remarkably few restaurant chains.
Unless you're Dunkin' Donuts, that is. Dunkin' Donuts franchises are the weeds that flourish even on salted, barren land, up here. I could tell you where one Dunkin' Donuts was in Michigan. One. And that's only because it was attached to a gas station. There are about thirty Dunkin' Donuts within a one-mile radius of me here, and they're building another two blocks down the street. Oh, and pretzel chains. Connecticut loves its hot pretzel chains. Dunkin' Donuts, if you ever come up with a pretzel-flavored donut for citizens of the Nutmeg State to dunk, you will have a hit on your hands of astronomical proportions.
You're welcome. I only ask for credit. And a small development fee.
But anyway. Yelp. I was hungry, and desperate, and so on my phone I punched in a request for a restaurant that was within a couple of miles and was cheap and served—yes—Mexican, and we ended up eating at a tiny little dive that had some really incredible food. It was so spicy I walked out with sweat marks on my back and on my thighs, but I like it like that. We used Yelp again for the other meals on those short trips. We'd look for a type of food, check out the reviews, and try the ones that seemed to be popular and get a lot of stars. It worked out well for us.
And it still does, since we continue to use the site to find places where we can grab a bite. It's especially handy when we head into Manhattan, with its bewildering abundance of choice. I find it generally easier to get a sense of what dishes are popular, of how much to expect to pay, and of whether or not I might like a place from reading through a dozen Yelp reviews, than I do from looking at a restaurant's website or accepting the word-of-mouth recommendations of local acquaintances.
If you sense there's a big but coming, you know me well. Because there's one thing about Yelp that really bugs me: I simply cannot stand many of its reviewers. We're talking about a small percentage here. Small, but super-irritating. I've noticed that a lot of Yelp reviewers provoke in me the same reaction I have when I hear someone is rubbing his hands all over an inflated latex balloon: I want to march over and make him stop. Preferably with a good slapping.
It's a phenomenon that seems almost endemic to this part of the country, too. When I was using Yelp back in Michigan, the reviews largely tended be along the lines of I like potatoes. This place serves good potatoes! The potatoes with cheese are good! The steak with cheese is great, and it comes with good potatoes! I really like the chicken with cheese too! I mean, throw a little cheese on something and the good people of Michigan are happy, simple folk who write happy, simple Yelp reviews as they loosen their belt buckles a notch.
But the East Coast Yelpers are complainers. A little bit of cheddar jack isn't going to distract them. Oh no. They're too savvy for your stinkin' dairyland legerdemain. They want to gripe about something, even if it's largely imaginary. In fact, many of them will complain without exactly knowing why, so there are a plethora of seemingly gentle, neutral reviews with a bit of a stinger at the end, like the two-star review of a coffee shop that reads:
This quiet, cozy establishment always has soft music playing in the background, and there's always a comfy chair to sit in. The atmosphere is collegial and friendly. Books and magazines line the walls and in the winter months there is a fire roaring in the fireplace. The coffee is delicious—the best I've ever had. So yeah, I find the place depressing and that's why I give it only two stars.
One wonders what more the poor reviewer would require from a coffee shop to get him out of that malaise. A cotton candy machine? A Zoloft dispenser?
The worst breed of Yelp reviewer, though, is the Yelper with Attitude. They know everything about food, and they want you to know that they know it. And they're going to make sure you know it in their hundred-word Yelp review, damn your eyes. Yelp on the East Coast is full of reviewers who write mini-essays that are less about the restaurants in question, and more about the reviewers themselves, and their psychological dramas.
I'm usually all in favor when a person makes the broadest of statements about his qualifications for making sweeping judgments about a restaurant. I wouldn't bat an eye at someone saying, I eat a lot of Indian food and this place had some yummy stuff! I do, however, find my eyebrow arching and my hackles rising at something like:
I have been on vacation to Phuket twice and I can say with authority that the $6 bowl of pad thai I ate from this establishment did not compare to the masterful culinary delights prepared by trained chefs with the freshest ingredients at the resort hotel at which I stayed.
Because that review is not really helpful. All it tells me is that the reviewer wants me to know he travels, that he spends a lot of money traveling and wants everyone to be aware of that fact, and that he is very concerned with the number of stars his hotel has received.
If I'm dining at Chip's Pancakes, which serves fifty-two varieties of pancakes (I've only worked my way through three, but I've got time and an elastic stomach), I can be sure that here in this area of the country, tucked among the many rapturous reviews from pancake lovers, will be one Yelper who declaims:
I decided to bring my hard-earned consumer dollars to Chip's because after a long drive along the highway after my vacation at the Cape, I was definitely in the mood for some rustic, simple fare after a week of seafood dining. What a mistake on my part! I was horrified when I stepped into this establishment to find at my table an assortment of flavored 'syrups', the containers no doubt made sticky by the countless grubby fingers of children, judging by the placemats, which have illustrations for young people to 'color' while waiting for their food. The 'maple' syrup was only maple flavored, a faux-pas I was happy to point out to the confused and badly-trained wait staff. The 'butter' (which I darkly suspect was really margarine, and was not whipped, as I prefer!) arrived in a 'patty' served in a CARDBOARD tub! But the last straw was when I saw my pancake! I am accustomed to my pancakes being of a thinner and more crepe-like consistency! I suppose I should not expect refined eating at an establishment that panders to the lowest common denominator.
No, Yelper, you really shouldn't. We're talking about Chip's Pancakes, which advertises itself with big fat pictures of big fat flapjacks on monster-sized signs that loom over I-95. We're not discussing Le Bon Creperie du Fwahfwah down in the Meatpacking District. At the Creperie you can get your refined eating. At Chip's you get a big fat plate of big fat pancakes with a design made in them out of blueberries. Shove some in that bag fat piehole of yours and spare me.
This type of reviewer is the sort that will often go to great lengths to let others know exactly how well-educated he is, how sophisticated, and how truly attuned to excellence is his palate. You can smell 'em coming a mile away, especially when a review begins:
It was a blustery autumn day, and I had just emerged from the rehearsal of the Jacobean revenge drama in which I was starring, and had a few minutes before my class in African tribal drumming was to begin. I carried a copy of the exquisite Colombian poetry of Anabel Torres beneath my arm. I paused before the door, hesitated, and with mild interest ripening into piquant curiosity, at last stepped over the threshold into the quaint establishment known as Swanky Frankie's Hot Dog Shack.
Oh yeah. These reviews sound like a blast to mock. And they are, for about the first dozen. But I get the impression that most of these self-absorbed reviewers are not the kind of people I'd want to hang out with. They just get nasty. They write irate, outraged, self-righteous reviews in which they admit they weren't dissatisfied with the prices, the decor, or the food itself, but because of some imagined slight that sent them into a tizzy—they were seated too near the kitchen, say. It seems instead of making a good faith effort to resolve the problem (like, by asking someone nicely, "Can we maybe get another table?"), the reviewer stews and sits stonily and is even more outraged when the wait staff don't notice their obvious, passive-aggressive displeasure.
Then he runs home and pounds out a scathing Yelp review, of course. Because that'll show 'em.
I've seen reviewers write exquisitely-detailed screeds about the disputes they'll have with restaurant owners and waiters that would make even the most die-hard proponent of the motto the customer is always right raise an eyebrow and admit, "Well, maybe except in this case." The amount of pride that some of these people take in stiffing their servers on a tip, or attempting to get them fired, makes me want to track down the reviewer in a restaurant, wait until they've ordered a hamburger, then ambush them and drop a loogie on top of the pickles and lettuce myself.
But even when they're not going to those extremes, up here the Yelpers always find something to complain about. The place in Hell's Kitchen that specializes in cramming homemade ice cream between homemade glazed doughnuts and then covering them with gooey syrups? It doesn't have healthy alternatives, one Yelp review will sniff. The fantastic ice cream shop down the street that serves exquisite little half-pint cups of gourmet ice cream layered with homemade cookie dough, in exotic flavor combinations, served with a little wooden paddle like they used to when I was in second grade? It lacks an attractive view from the front windows, says one Yelper with a lofty, two-star dismissal.
You know what, Yelpers? Moderate your expectations. Seriously. Find a healthier dessert place among the several hundred cluttering Hell's Kitchen. Resign yourself to the notion that a street-level storefront tucked among the residences on West 47th is not going to have the same view as a chi-chi place atop the Time-Warner Center. If the food sucks, fine. Tell me. If the service was truly rotten, I want to hear about it. But if you're more interested in informing me that you have impossible standards to which very little can match, I'm already yawning and rolling my eyes.
If Maria Callas were alive today, she wouldn't be teaching master classes. She'd be writing Yelp reviews.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Med, Med Passion
Guess WHAT, y’all? Apparently Oscar Wilde wasn't gay.
I KNOW.
I have spent more time than I care to admit this week under the spell of Lillie, a 1978 British ITV miniseries starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry. It is freakin’ ridiculous. And I can't stop watching it.
I was flipping through the streaming Netflix on my TV when this juicy thirteen-part miniseries popped up in the 'Recommended for You Because You’ll Watch Anything With British Accents, Sucker!’ section. I was thumbing over it on the way to some reality TV selection when I saw that Annis was the star.
Now I love me some Francesca Annis. She was gorgeous in her prime, and really quite charming in the Agatha Christie Partners in Crime Tommy and Tuppence mystery adaptations, umpteen years ago. In fact, Annis is so charming when she's laughing and being silly, and so beautiful, that it really has managed to distract me from the fact that when she gives the occasional stab at Serious Dramatic Acting, capitalized, she only comes off as a mildly-constipated and thoroughly-campy moo-cow.
So anyway, Lillie begins with Annis-as-Langtry being wooed by some kind of army captain or somesuch, on the shores of Jersey. You can tell he’s important, because the costume department has really gone to town with the gold braid on his uniform. He's lovestruck by her beauty as the pair of them race their stallions across the glittering island sands. Okay, their stunt doubles race for them, in a very blurry long shot apparently filmed through several layers of gauze. Annis and her beau mostly stand still and cling onto their horses for dear life while they Emote, with a capital E.
Annis is a apparent mute on a horse, who responds to the captain’s questions by hiding behind her girlish curls and batting her lashes so fiercely that they stir up a medium-sized monsoon. She’s gorgeous, in a slightly big-eyed bovine way, but she’s got all the acting subtlety of one of the pre-talkies Gish sisters. She’s also, how shall we say . . . very busty?
Smitten by her mute beauty, the army captain races to Langtry's father to ask for her hand in marriage, and her father says something like, "Yes, she has something of her mother's handsome good looks and maturity.” Which I think is a tactful synonym for busty. “But tell me sir, did you not notice that she's...?"
And my brain automatically supplies, "...forty-five?"
Only the father says, "... a mere slip of a girl of age fifteen?"
And this is the point I sat up and screamed at the television, "FIFTEEN?!" Because I'm thinking, you know, it's only EIGHT years later that Annis is playing Kristin Scott Thomas' cougar MOTHER in that horrible Prince movie, Under the Cherry Moon, for chrissakes. Immediately I ran to IMDB and calculated that Annis had been THIRTY-THREE when this was abomination was made.
GOOD LORD. FIFTEEN?
But then when I realized that Lillie was one big ol' camp-fest, I started getting into it. It's the kind of plummy miniseries that isn't made any more, in which the passions and the period costume budgets run high, and in the name of getting the grand sweep of history wedged into, god help us, thirteen long hours, none of it quite makes any sense.
The result is a lot of disconnected, though sumptuous, scenes that involve people rushing into a room removing their gloves while breathing out exposition-heavy lines straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica like, “Heavens above I cannot believe it was three years ago that I was last at home here in Jersey only twelve nautical miles from the Cotetin Peninsula of France in the home of my father the noted Dean of Jersey and how sad it is that now I am here for the funeral of my beloved brother Reggie born 1862 died 1881!”
Or in which the actors playing royalty shorthand their goodbreeding by replacing all of their Rs with Ws, so that they can spit out dialogue like, “Weally, Weginald! We wespect your views, but how can you wevel in the company of a mawwied woman with only a single dwess to her name? You are an awistocwat!” Or in which in all his appearances, Prince Leopold staggers and clutches at the scenery with such dramatic foreshadowing that you half-expect one of the extras to shout out, “Hey, Leo? Hemophilia acting up again?”
And of course, in order to give the viewers not on a sense of time and place, but a snobbish sense of having had a good-enough historical education, all of the nineteenth-century's notables all attend the same smart parties, where the dialogue inevitably runs like this:
ANYWAY.
I have had the scales of hidebound tradition simply LIFTED from my eyes by Lillie’s revelation that Oscar Wilde wasn't at ALL a devotee of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Especially in 1978. Because he speaks her name all the time, and it’s LILLIE, baby!
You see, according to the screenwriters, Wilde had the hots for Lillie Langtry Aged Twenty-Sixish. She was his vixen, his goddess, his New Helen. She was WOMAN, baby. But she was so pure, so sweet, so beautiful, and so devoted to her husband that what could he do but renounce all earthly desire on the spot. and remained devoted to her forevermore. She ruined him for all lesser mortals, and remained his muse, his unrequited crush, his med, med pession, his womantic tweasure.
I don't care about whole mess with Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury, or his jail time. Whatever. Scwew documented history. Wilde was Langtrysexual. That’s what the writers of Lillie tell me, and I’m sticking to it.
I KNOW.
I have spent more time than I care to admit this week under the spell of Lillie, a 1978 British ITV miniseries starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry. It is freakin’ ridiculous. And I can't stop watching it.
I was flipping through the streaming Netflix on my TV when this juicy thirteen-part miniseries popped up in the 'Recommended for You Because You’ll Watch Anything With British Accents, Sucker!’ section. I was thumbing over it on the way to some reality TV selection when I saw that Annis was the star.
Now I love me some Francesca Annis. She was gorgeous in her prime, and really quite charming in the Agatha Christie Partners in Crime Tommy and Tuppence mystery adaptations, umpteen years ago. In fact, Annis is so charming when she's laughing and being silly, and so beautiful, that it really has managed to distract me from the fact that when she gives the occasional stab at Serious Dramatic Acting, capitalized, she only comes off as a mildly-constipated and thoroughly-campy moo-cow.
So anyway, Lillie begins with Annis-as-Langtry being wooed by some kind of army captain or somesuch, on the shores of Jersey. You can tell he’s important, because the costume department has really gone to town with the gold braid on his uniform. He's lovestruck by her beauty as the pair of them race their stallions across the glittering island sands. Okay, their stunt doubles race for them, in a very blurry long shot apparently filmed through several layers of gauze. Annis and her beau mostly stand still and cling onto their horses for dear life while they Emote, with a capital E.
Annis is a apparent mute on a horse, who responds to the captain’s questions by hiding behind her girlish curls and batting her lashes so fiercely that they stir up a medium-sized monsoon. She’s gorgeous, in a slightly big-eyed bovine way, but she’s got all the acting subtlety of one of the pre-talkies Gish sisters. She’s also, how shall we say . . . very busty?
Smitten by her mute beauty, the army captain races to Langtry's father to ask for her hand in marriage, and her father says something like, "Yes, she has something of her mother's handsome good looks and maturity.” Which I think is a tactful synonym for busty. “But tell me sir, did you not notice that she's...?"
And my brain automatically supplies, "...forty-five?"
Only the father says, "... a mere slip of a girl of age fifteen?"
And this is the point I sat up and screamed at the television, "FIFTEEN?!" Because I'm thinking, you know, it's only EIGHT years later that Annis is playing Kristin Scott Thomas' cougar MOTHER in that horrible Prince movie, Under the Cherry Moon, for chrissakes. Immediately I ran to IMDB and calculated that Annis had been THIRTY-THREE when this was abomination was made.
GOOD LORD. FIFTEEN?
But then when I realized that Lillie was one big ol' camp-fest, I started getting into it. It's the kind of plummy miniseries that isn't made any more, in which the passions and the period costume budgets run high, and in the name of getting the grand sweep of history wedged into, god help us, thirteen long hours, none of it quite makes any sense.
The result is a lot of disconnected, though sumptuous, scenes that involve people rushing into a room removing their gloves while breathing out exposition-heavy lines straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica like, “Heavens above I cannot believe it was three years ago that I was last at home here in Jersey only twelve nautical miles from the Cotetin Peninsula of France in the home of my father the noted Dean of Jersey and how sad it is that now I am here for the funeral of my beloved brother Reggie born 1862 died 1881!”
Or in which the actors playing royalty shorthand their goodbreeding by replacing all of their Rs with Ws, so that they can spit out dialogue like, “Weally, Weginald! We wespect your views, but how can you wevel in the company of a mawwied woman with only a single dwess to her name? You are an awistocwat!” Or in which in all his appearances, Prince Leopold staggers and clutches at the scenery with such dramatic foreshadowing that you half-expect one of the extras to shout out, “Hey, Leo? Hemophilia acting up again?”
And of course, in order to give the viewers not on a sense of time and place, but a snobbish sense of having had a good-enough historical education, all of the nineteenth-century's notables all attend the same smart parties, where the dialogue inevitably runs like this:
THE BUTLER ANNOUNCING ARRIVALS: The poet and illustrator John Everett Millais!Okay, maybe in my fever to plow through the series I have confused some of the party guests, but the miniseries is so gleefully anachronistic that you half-expect to see some woman in a leather aviator hat stomp into the party with a glint of derring-do in her eye, so that Wilde can shout out, "Ah, Miss Earhart! Leaving on a trip?"
LONG-HAIRED EFFETE POET CARRYING A GIANT CALLA LILY LEFT OVER FROM A COLLEGE PRODUCTION OF PATIENCE: Begorrah, but what a true vision of loveliness my eyes behold before me! So fresh, so young! If there is any justice in the world, there would be a portrait of you growing fearsome in age, mouldering in some attic! Begorrah!
SOME OTHER VICTORIAN PANSY: Why what a fine idea for one of your stories!
LONG-HAIRED POET: You’re always after me Lucky Charms!
THE BUTLER: Upstart novelist Charlotte Bronte and the tart Emily Dickinson!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-THREE: Sir, I can tell by your brogue that you must be of the Emerald Isle. Are you a poet?
OTHER VICTORIAN: Is he a poet! Only the best poet I know! Mrs. Langtry, permit me to introduce Mr. Oscar Wilde!
OSCAR WILDE: Why thank you, Mr. Robert Browning!
THE BUTLER: Alexander Graham Bell!
OSCAR WILDE: And here is my good American friend, John Whistler!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-FIVE: How d’ye do, Mr. Whistler.
WHISTLER: Peachy-keen! I am Amerrrrrrican. I am not a Burrrrritish actorrrr speaking very brrrrroad Rs to disguise that I am frrrrom Hampshirrrrrre. Why, you arrrre prrrretty as a picturrrrrrre, Mrs. Langtrrrrry.
OSCAR WILDE: You should make a portrait of this divinity, John. He was so desperate for a subject, Mrs. Langtry, that he was considering painting his mother next!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED THIRTY: Hah-hah-hah!
WHISTLER: Hah-hah-hah!
THE BUTLER: Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle and Florence Nightingale!
ANYWAY.
I have had the scales of hidebound tradition simply LIFTED from my eyes by Lillie’s revelation that Oscar Wilde wasn't at ALL a devotee of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Especially in 1978. Because he speaks her name all the time, and it’s LILLIE, baby!
You see, according to the screenwriters, Wilde had the hots for Lillie Langtry Aged Twenty-Sixish. She was his vixen, his goddess, his New Helen. She was WOMAN, baby. But she was so pure, so sweet, so beautiful, and so devoted to her husband that what could he do but renounce all earthly desire on the spot. and remained devoted to her forevermore. She ruined him for all lesser mortals, and remained his muse, his unrequited crush, his med, med pession, his womantic tweasure.
I don't care about whole mess with Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury, or his jail time. Whatever. Scwew documented history. Wilde was Langtrysexual. That’s what the writers of Lillie tell me, and I’m sticking to it.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Book Review Roundup
I’m making another roundup of books I’ve read and reviewed on Goodreads.com. My Mindy Kaling review has been oddly popular. It’s not even that vicious.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
A quick warning about an otherwise good book: the last third of The Office writer Kaling's memoir is a scattershot, hit-or-miss affair. With short essays like "Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?" and "In Defense of Chest Hair", which graze their topics no more deeply than the titles suggest, Kaling almost sounds like she's half-heartedly trying out for the late and perpetually cranky Andy Rooney's vacated gig on 60 Minutes.
It's a shame, because the first two-thirds of Kaling's effort is an engaging memoir chronicling a thoroughly conventional upbringing and an unlikely rise to notoriety and television scripting fame. Her circuitous route to her career is both affable and a fun read—which makes it all the more disappointing that once she reaches the heights at NBC, the rest of the book sputters out when it has nowhere to go.
It seems unfairly reductive that the memoir will inevitably undergo comparisons with her same-network compatriot Tiny Fey's Bossypants. I found Kaling's effort the more charming of the two, and the less labored.
Little Dorritt
By Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit's opening chapters begin with long stretches of dialogue in which the speakers remain nameless and unintroduced. Yet it's a book obsessed with names—characters obsessed with keeping their names out of the mud, characters with false names, or infamous names, with exalted names that lead dozens of the book's protagonists to financial ruin. Tattycorum, a young woman in the book, runs away from home primarily because of the awful name her benefactors have given her. The titular character prefers a mawkish nickname given her by a complete stranger to the name of Amy, given her by a failure of a father.
There are parts of the novel that bog down—I had great difficulty getting through any of the lengthy chapters about the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office. For every Barnacle (and there are plenty) there's a delightfully-comic Flora, or a heartbreaking young John Chivery or sweet-natured Maggy to balance it out. And by the time everything comes crashing quite literally down at the end, it's almost impossible not to marvel at the complexity and satisfactory conclusion of Dickens' creation.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
A disclosure: I haven't read a Stephen King novel since high school, when Cujo came out and I thought it was lousy. That said, King managed to push enough buttons with the premise of his latest novel—Time travel! Someone attempting to prevent the Kennedy assassination! A secret wormhole in Maine that travels to the Mad Men era!—that I was intrigued enough to give it a look.
I confess that there were parts of 11/22/63 that I enjoyed. The mini-novella that forms the book's first third, in Derry, is tense and atmospheric. The romance that overwhelms the latter half of the work is sweet; its resolution is unexpectedly touching.
But that's really about it. The book's set-up is bafflingly underdone—so much so that it makes the protagonist seem a little more dim-witted than King intends. The hero has no personal obsession with preventing Oswald from killing JFK in Dallas. He merely undertakes the task, with remarkably little persuasion required, because some guy he barely knows who owns a restaurant where he occasionally eats, tells him it'd be an awesome idea. Nor is it really explained why the Kennedy assassination is the lynchpin of the modern era that so desperately needs to be undone. Why not the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Watergate? Why not 9/11? Intriguing as the premise might be, it's laid out so arbitrarily, and given such an easy out if the time-traveling thing doesn't work, that it's difficult to care much.
King's pacing can be terribly off, too. The scenes involving Lee Harvey Oswald grind the book to a halt, and sometimes read like the determined regurgitations of an author who did a lot of research, dammit, and who intends to use every last bit. An episode of coma-cum-amnesia right before the climax was so transparently a ploy to zip through a few months straight to the confrontation in the Texas School Book Depository, that I felt a little embarrassed for the author for stooping to use it.
There's some excitement here, and some sweet moments, but there were also more points in which picking up 11/22/63 felt like a chore than a pleasure. And I still think Cujo was pretty lousy, too.
Charles Dickens: A Life
by Claire Tomalin
Brisk, thorough, and wisely free of ephemera, Tomalin's biography of Dickens manages to be informative without either lionizing the author, or ignoring his greater domestic lapses and faults.
The Brontë Myth
by Lucasta Miller
Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.
Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.
It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.
Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.
Changes (The Collegium Chronicles, #3)
by Mercedes Lackey
I find insulting the suggestion that Lackey's latest Valdemar entry is more suitable for young adults.
Insulting to the YA audience, that is. They're better than the weaksauce plotting here, and the book's bland characters. Nor would they tolerate the protagonist's spoken dialect—an apostrophe-laden mess that makes Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn look positively light-handed, and which had me praying for chapters at a time that the protagonist would be gagged, rendered mute, or would sleep so that I wouldn't have to read it. And any generation raised on Harry Potter would see through Kirball as the blatant Quidditch rip-off it is.
I rather enjoyed the first two books in Lackey's return to Valdemar. It's a shame that the third not only progresses the series not an inch, but makes absolutely no sense at all .
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
by Kate Summerscale
The Road Hill murder case, in which three-year-old Saville Kent was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances in the dead of night, in his family's remote yet overcrowded home, so scandalized Victorian England that the fascination surrounding it continued for years. During that time, the incident laid the foundations for not only the Victorian novel of sensation, but a more enduring literary form: the British detective novel.
Many of the literary tropes we take for granted in the genre arise from the detectives investigating the case--particularly the Mr. Whicher of the title. The Road Hill case had it all: a senseless murder with no apparent motives, a thorough search for evidence (the first appearance of the word 'clueless' in the English language stems from the case), the 'hunch' of the detective, the suspicion of innocents, ruthless courtroom drama, and even a murderer's confession. Throughout her thorough narrative of the events of the Road Hill case and its outcome, Summerscale carefully delineates how the murder and its investigation sparked the literary imaginations of Braddon, Dickens, Collins, and an entire generation of novelists who capitalized upon the case's notoriety.
Yet Summerscale's own surprising twist of how she imagined the night of the murder, and the years following, to take place appear as something as an afterthought. It's supported on the page not by any evidence collected at the time, but more by the authors and novels that came well after the murder. It's not at all unreasonable to trace these novels as arising from the Road Hill events; to suggest an almost sentimental solution to the crime based on a reading of nascent literary archetypes is a little silly.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Alan Partridge
A-hah! Finally, Norwich's most inescapable talk show host has released a biography that shines a light on one of one of history's most underrated and misunderstood broadcasters. (1) True—his notoriety rests almost entirely on the fact that during the last minutes of the last show of his BBC2 series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (2), he shot and killed one of his guests. After that bombshell (3), what the BBC overlooked, as Alan Partridge points out in his scathing exposé, is that in none of the previous five episodes, no one got shot at all. (4)
The fictional Alan Partridge was one of the UK's most infamous and funny forerunners in the Comedy of Discomfort epitomized later by the original version of The Office. He's also one of its most long-lived, having survived a roller-coaster career that hit rock-bottom during a debilitating Toblerone dependency, and soared to heights attainable only by judicious use of a sturdy stepladder. Peppered with the wry humor that made his radio and television outings so successful, I, Partridge is a must-read for fans of Alan, though it might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with his several series.
Do not skip Partridge’s footnotes, which are as amusing as the text itself.
(1) Himself, if that wasn't clear.
(2) Also known as KMKYWAP, as Alan pointed out to a guest who immediately told him that his name was an anagram of 'Anal Prat Dirge.' Ungrateful lot, those guests.
(3) Not literally.
(4) Insulted, yes. But shot, no.
Patti LuPone: A Memoir
by Patti LuPone
It's tough for anyone not actively sharing a stage with the diminutive star to determine whether Patti LuPone is as difficult to work with as her reputation would have it. Too often, 'difficult' is a label applied not only to entitled divas of both genders, but also to artists who dare to protest when wrongly abused by directors or producers and their sometimes shady money-making tactics.
After reading LuPone's memoir, however, it's tough to want to side with anyone other than the woman who originated the American Evita. Though she's capable of throwing tantrums with the best of them, LuPone is disarmingly candid about her own shortcomings, including her temper and her seeming inability to tell composers and directors to send offers to her agent, rather than asking her commit to new projects before it's wise. She's earthy: she calls still-living actors 'assholes,' and bluntly says things of other professionals such as, "He sucked." She's frank about her heartbreak over the much-publicized feud with Andrew Lloyd Webber over being denied the American debut of Sunset Boulevard, and her cold detente with Glenn Close, who supplanted her. Underlying the barbs is LuPone's wry sense of humor, though, in addition to a remarkable grasp of the drive and discipline needed to maintain a career as a working actor—much less the stuff of legend.
LuPone's frank memoir is a quick and fun read that crackles with gossip and an insider's view of the Broadway and London stages. Even if LuPone is a bit of a diva . . . well, it's still awfully tempting to cheer her on.
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
I know that saying The Magicians is like the bastard love child of the Harry Potter books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History would compel a certain subset of my friends to rush out and read it, if they haven't already. So let me amend that slightly by emphasizing that this grown-up fantasy novel about youths matriculating through a school of magic is indeed very much like those—if all the youths were from Slytherin.
Grossman's cast is largely overprivileged and seemingly determined to squander their advantages on alcohol, whoring, and dissipation; his hero is moody and unsympathetic, and largely unable to grasp or appreciate the wonders to which he's miraculously made privy. I'm usually the last to insist that a protagonist be entirely appealing, but even my patience was tried.
And yet The Magicians has a richness of detail and texture that makes it a compelling read, despite the mopey and largely stiff cast. Its land of magic is not only believable, but has the alluring scent of the many classic worlds, from Narnia to Hogwarts, from which it derives.
The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
The big attraction to many—including myself—of Grossman's first novel in this series, The Magicians, was the fussy pedagogical narrative involving the protagonist's matriculation at Brakebills, an institute for the magically talented. There's precious little of the imaginary Brakebills in The Magician King, and yet oddly, the sequel manages to be more confident, and more lyrical, without the expected and much-trodden literary tropes of tales of school days.
I originally had little affection Quentin, the protagonist in The Magicians. I found him and his set of friends too moody, too overprivileged, too emo. That Grossman allows Quentin to ripen here, as he makes adult decisions about which quests are for him, and which to be left unapproached, is remarkable. There's a grace to his maturation that's both unexpected and breathtaking. As wild and far-flung as the book seems upon a first read, there's a wicked coherence in its structure that should leave any reader moved by its final pages.
I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg
Subtle, this book ain't. Rather than let any mystery of character or plot accumulate throughout the book, Flagg stops the proceedings immediately to insert flashbacks that explain everything that happened in the previous chapter. In a novel that hinges on a girl-detective-style discovery of a literal skeleton in a closet, it's like reading a Nancy Drew mystery written for those with the shortest of short-term attention spans.
As for the decades-old mystery at the center of I Still Dream About You—it's tangential, unfocused, and largely unintegrated with the rest of the story. Nobody solves it; it scarcely matters that they don't. Flagg's done better in the past.
Still. Flagg's primary virtues as a writer are an abundance of effortless charm, and the ability to fashion stories around communities of nice, polite people with nice, polite intentions . . . and to make characters that could be homogenous seem quite real. As whisper-thin as the plot might be here, its cast is engaging. Flagg has an unparalleled ability to immerse readers into her fictional communities, and make them wish they resided within the pages of her gentle Southern comedies.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
A quick warning about an otherwise good book: the last third of The Office writer Kaling's memoir is a scattershot, hit-or-miss affair. With short essays like "Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?" and "In Defense of Chest Hair", which graze their topics no more deeply than the titles suggest, Kaling almost sounds like she's half-heartedly trying out for the late and perpetually cranky Andy Rooney's vacated gig on 60 Minutes.
It's a shame, because the first two-thirds of Kaling's effort is an engaging memoir chronicling a thoroughly conventional upbringing and an unlikely rise to notoriety and television scripting fame. Her circuitous route to her career is both affable and a fun read—which makes it all the more disappointing that once she reaches the heights at NBC, the rest of the book sputters out when it has nowhere to go.
It seems unfairly reductive that the memoir will inevitably undergo comparisons with her same-network compatriot Tiny Fey's Bossypants. I found Kaling's effort the more charming of the two, and the less labored.
Little Dorritt
By Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit's opening chapters begin with long stretches of dialogue in which the speakers remain nameless and unintroduced. Yet it's a book obsessed with names—characters obsessed with keeping their names out of the mud, characters with false names, or infamous names, with exalted names that lead dozens of the book's protagonists to financial ruin. Tattycorum, a young woman in the book, runs away from home primarily because of the awful name her benefactors have given her. The titular character prefers a mawkish nickname given her by a complete stranger to the name of Amy, given her by a failure of a father.
There are parts of the novel that bog down—I had great difficulty getting through any of the lengthy chapters about the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office. For every Barnacle (and there are plenty) there's a delightfully-comic Flora, or a heartbreaking young John Chivery or sweet-natured Maggy to balance it out. And by the time everything comes crashing quite literally down at the end, it's almost impossible not to marvel at the complexity and satisfactory conclusion of Dickens' creation.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
A disclosure: I haven't read a Stephen King novel since high school, when Cujo came out and I thought it was lousy. That said, King managed to push enough buttons with the premise of his latest novel—Time travel! Someone attempting to prevent the Kennedy assassination! A secret wormhole in Maine that travels to the Mad Men era!—that I was intrigued enough to give it a look.
I confess that there were parts of 11/22/63 that I enjoyed. The mini-novella that forms the book's first third, in Derry, is tense and atmospheric. The romance that overwhelms the latter half of the work is sweet; its resolution is unexpectedly touching.
But that's really about it. The book's set-up is bafflingly underdone—so much so that it makes the protagonist seem a little more dim-witted than King intends. The hero has no personal obsession with preventing Oswald from killing JFK in Dallas. He merely undertakes the task, with remarkably little persuasion required, because some guy he barely knows who owns a restaurant where he occasionally eats, tells him it'd be an awesome idea. Nor is it really explained why the Kennedy assassination is the lynchpin of the modern era that so desperately needs to be undone. Why not the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Watergate? Why not 9/11? Intriguing as the premise might be, it's laid out so arbitrarily, and given such an easy out if the time-traveling thing doesn't work, that it's difficult to care much.
King's pacing can be terribly off, too. The scenes involving Lee Harvey Oswald grind the book to a halt, and sometimes read like the determined regurgitations of an author who did a lot of research, dammit, and who intends to use every last bit. An episode of coma-cum-amnesia right before the climax was so transparently a ploy to zip through a few months straight to the confrontation in the Texas School Book Depository, that I felt a little embarrassed for the author for stooping to use it.
There's some excitement here, and some sweet moments, but there were also more points in which picking up 11/22/63 felt like a chore than a pleasure. And I still think Cujo was pretty lousy, too.
Charles Dickens: A Life
by Claire Tomalin
Brisk, thorough, and wisely free of ephemera, Tomalin's biography of Dickens manages to be informative without either lionizing the author, or ignoring his greater domestic lapses and faults.
The Brontë Myth
by Lucasta Miller
Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.
Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.
It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.
Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.
Changes (The Collegium Chronicles, #3)
by Mercedes Lackey
I find insulting the suggestion that Lackey's latest Valdemar entry is more suitable for young adults.
Insulting to the YA audience, that is. They're better than the weaksauce plotting here, and the book's bland characters. Nor would they tolerate the protagonist's spoken dialect—an apostrophe-laden mess that makes Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn look positively light-handed, and which had me praying for chapters at a time that the protagonist would be gagged, rendered mute, or would sleep so that I wouldn't have to read it. And any generation raised on Harry Potter would see through Kirball as the blatant Quidditch rip-off it is.
I rather enjoyed the first two books in Lackey's return to Valdemar. It's a shame that the third not only progresses the series not an inch, but makes absolutely no sense at all .
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
by Kate Summerscale
The Road Hill murder case, in which three-year-old Saville Kent was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances in the dead of night, in his family's remote yet overcrowded home, so scandalized Victorian England that the fascination surrounding it continued for years. During that time, the incident laid the foundations for not only the Victorian novel of sensation, but a more enduring literary form: the British detective novel.
Many of the literary tropes we take for granted in the genre arise from the detectives investigating the case--particularly the Mr. Whicher of the title. The Road Hill case had it all: a senseless murder with no apparent motives, a thorough search for evidence (the first appearance of the word 'clueless' in the English language stems from the case), the 'hunch' of the detective, the suspicion of innocents, ruthless courtroom drama, and even a murderer's confession. Throughout her thorough narrative of the events of the Road Hill case and its outcome, Summerscale carefully delineates how the murder and its investigation sparked the literary imaginations of Braddon, Dickens, Collins, and an entire generation of novelists who capitalized upon the case's notoriety.
Yet Summerscale's own surprising twist of how she imagined the night of the murder, and the years following, to take place appear as something as an afterthought. It's supported on the page not by any evidence collected at the time, but more by the authors and novels that came well after the murder. It's not at all unreasonable to trace these novels as arising from the Road Hill events; to suggest an almost sentimental solution to the crime based on a reading of nascent literary archetypes is a little silly.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Alan Partridge
A-hah! Finally, Norwich's most inescapable talk show host has released a biography that shines a light on one of one of history's most underrated and misunderstood broadcasters. (1) True—his notoriety rests almost entirely on the fact that during the last minutes of the last show of his BBC2 series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (2), he shot and killed one of his guests. After that bombshell (3), what the BBC overlooked, as Alan Partridge points out in his scathing exposé, is that in none of the previous five episodes, no one got shot at all. (4)
The fictional Alan Partridge was one of the UK's most infamous and funny forerunners in the Comedy of Discomfort epitomized later by the original version of The Office. He's also one of its most long-lived, having survived a roller-coaster career that hit rock-bottom during a debilitating Toblerone dependency, and soared to heights attainable only by judicious use of a sturdy stepladder. Peppered with the wry humor that made his radio and television outings so successful, I, Partridge is a must-read for fans of Alan, though it might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with his several series.
Do not skip Partridge’s footnotes, which are as amusing as the text itself.
(1) Himself, if that wasn't clear.
(2) Also known as KMKYWAP, as Alan pointed out to a guest who immediately told him that his name was an anagram of 'Anal Prat Dirge.' Ungrateful lot, those guests.
(3) Not literally.
(4) Insulted, yes. But shot, no.
Patti LuPone: A Memoir
by Patti LuPone
It's tough for anyone not actively sharing a stage with the diminutive star to determine whether Patti LuPone is as difficult to work with as her reputation would have it. Too often, 'difficult' is a label applied not only to entitled divas of both genders, but also to artists who dare to protest when wrongly abused by directors or producers and their sometimes shady money-making tactics.
After reading LuPone's memoir, however, it's tough to want to side with anyone other than the woman who originated the American Evita. Though she's capable of throwing tantrums with the best of them, LuPone is disarmingly candid about her own shortcomings, including her temper and her seeming inability to tell composers and directors to send offers to her agent, rather than asking her commit to new projects before it's wise. She's earthy: she calls still-living actors 'assholes,' and bluntly says things of other professionals such as, "He sucked." She's frank about her heartbreak over the much-publicized feud with Andrew Lloyd Webber over being denied the American debut of Sunset Boulevard, and her cold detente with Glenn Close, who supplanted her. Underlying the barbs is LuPone's wry sense of humor, though, in addition to a remarkable grasp of the drive and discipline needed to maintain a career as a working actor—much less the stuff of legend.
LuPone's frank memoir is a quick and fun read that crackles with gossip and an insider's view of the Broadway and London stages. Even if LuPone is a bit of a diva . . . well, it's still awfully tempting to cheer her on.
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
I know that saying The Magicians is like the bastard love child of the Harry Potter books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History would compel a certain subset of my friends to rush out and read it, if they haven't already. So let me amend that slightly by emphasizing that this grown-up fantasy novel about youths matriculating through a school of magic is indeed very much like those—if all the youths were from Slytherin.
Grossman's cast is largely overprivileged and seemingly determined to squander their advantages on alcohol, whoring, and dissipation; his hero is moody and unsympathetic, and largely unable to grasp or appreciate the wonders to which he's miraculously made privy. I'm usually the last to insist that a protagonist be entirely appealing, but even my patience was tried.
And yet The Magicians has a richness of detail and texture that makes it a compelling read, despite the mopey and largely stiff cast. Its land of magic is not only believable, but has the alluring scent of the many classic worlds, from Narnia to Hogwarts, from which it derives.
The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
The big attraction to many—including myself—of Grossman's first novel in this series, The Magicians, was the fussy pedagogical narrative involving the protagonist's matriculation at Brakebills, an institute for the magically talented. There's precious little of the imaginary Brakebills in The Magician King, and yet oddly, the sequel manages to be more confident, and more lyrical, without the expected and much-trodden literary tropes of tales of school days.
I originally had little affection Quentin, the protagonist in The Magicians. I found him and his set of friends too moody, too overprivileged, too emo. That Grossman allows Quentin to ripen here, as he makes adult decisions about which quests are for him, and which to be left unapproached, is remarkable. There's a grace to his maturation that's both unexpected and breathtaking. As wild and far-flung as the book seems upon a first read, there's a wicked coherence in its structure that should leave any reader moved by its final pages.
I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg
Subtle, this book ain't. Rather than let any mystery of character or plot accumulate throughout the book, Flagg stops the proceedings immediately to insert flashbacks that explain everything that happened in the previous chapter. In a novel that hinges on a girl-detective-style discovery of a literal skeleton in a closet, it's like reading a Nancy Drew mystery written for those with the shortest of short-term attention spans.
As for the decades-old mystery at the center of I Still Dream About You—it's tangential, unfocused, and largely unintegrated with the rest of the story. Nobody solves it; it scarcely matters that they don't. Flagg's done better in the past.
Still. Flagg's primary virtues as a writer are an abundance of effortless charm, and the ability to fashion stories around communities of nice, polite people with nice, polite intentions . . . and to make characters that could be homogenous seem quite real. As whisper-thin as the plot might be here, its cast is engaging. Flagg has an unparalleled ability to immerse readers into her fictional communities, and make them wish they resided within the pages of her gentle Southern comedies.
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