“I’ve been re-reading Jane Austen all my life, and each time I learn more about, say, the nature and goodness of Jane Bennet, or the perfection of malevolent self-deception that is Mrs Norris.”

“There are two main arguments in favour of seeing or hearing or generally experiencing things again. Firstly, seeing again very often means seeing anew: it’s only on the second (or third, or tenth) reading that details of plot and character become clear; that patterns and their meaning emerge with their full force. I’ve been re-reading Jane Austen all my life, and each time I learn more about, say, the nature and goodness of Jane Bennet, or the perfection of malevolent self-deception that is Mrs Norris…………When I think of how little I understand in my first readings, and hence how much I would miss if I adopted a policy of never reading anything twice, I’m just appalled.”

Eve Garrard at Normblog, on re-reading books. I have no problem re-reading books that I like, and I don’t feel that it is a waste of time. Frankly, I find it a bit of a comfort to revisit things. Being a narcissist (hello, I have a blog and it’s all about ME), I especially like to remember how I first read the book and what was going on in my life at the time. Sad, but true.

A book I love to re-read is Lucky Jim. It never fails to floor me with laughter. If I had any talent or drive whatsoever, I would write my own version of it, although, I sort of DID live a version of it. That, however, is too pathetic a tale to share with all of you. It really was pretty awful.

*Oh, listening to Massive Attack now. Creepy.

**I seem to like starting sentences with ‘Oh’, lately. What’s that all about?

“…as substantial and soothing as a blue range of mountains seen from far away.”

“There was one consolation: they could go to sleep without any fear of being waked in an hour by the abrupt, thumping, hard-breathing, door-slamming sounds of a fight; all that, apparently, was a thing of the past. They could lie drowsing now under the sound of kindly voices in the living room, a sound whose intricately rhythmic rise and fall would slowly turn into the shape of their dreams. And if they came awake later to turn over and reach with their toes for new cool places in the sheets, they knew the sound would still be there – one voice very deep and the other soft and pretty, talking and talking, as substantial and soothing as a blue range of mountains seen from far away.”

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Watching Titanic and Rocky on television; plus, Camille Paglia

Did anyone else do that yesterday? Flip between Titanic and Rocky (American Movie Classics and, what was the other channel, TBS, maybe?).

Oh, I’ve seen the movies before, both, lots of times, but the contrast was interesting, and so I flipped between each film. I have to add that I am a fan of Titanic. Well, Camille Paglia defends it, you know?  “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I do deserve this drubbing. I agree with you about Leonardo DiCaprio being as weak as a tea crumpet in “Titanic,” but Kate Winslet was phenomenal. She was luscious, vibrant and athletic and carried the whole film. True, she and Leo seemed like mother and son sometimes, but what the heck? Her period high-class Philadelphia accent was all wrong (bad speech coach), and the film’s special effects were dismayingly uneven — the glorious North Atlantic stars, for example, were nothing but tacky, generic dots. But the Titanic story in any version will always entrance because it’s a morality play about the hubris of Western culture, in love with its own frail technology. In this case, it also had Celine Dion’s mega-operatic theme song, which I still find moving and riveting.”

Actually, I’m not sure I agree with any of that, Leonardo DiCaprio’s boyishness is exactly what you might want in a first love, especially if you are a young woman like the Rose character in Titanic.  My brother, who is refreshingly straightforward, called me yesterday to say hi and to have me talk to one of my nieces who is  learning to talk, and he was all, “it was a good movie,” when I told him what I was doing. Bless him for it, he just says what he thinks.

Impressions from yesterday afternoon:

1. Sylvester Stallone wrote Rocky? I always forget that, and, good for him. There are many clever twists, but, one that sticks out is that Rocky is crazy for his friend’s sister, a kind of mousy wall-flower. Clever, most young men might have written her differently. It’s touching when he says, “she’s got gaps, I’ve got gaps, but together, no gaps,” or something like that. It’s from memory.

2. The look of Titanic is jeweled and golden, and the remembrances by the main character are like brightly colored gems stored in that safe, ready to be opened, so that the jewels shine, once more, in the sun.

3. Oh, the seventies. Dirty, brown, and dreary. Such good movies, though. Is that why Hollywood keeps recreating the seventies? Enough, already.

4. Nothing else really, it’s been a rough day at work and somehow it helps to jot little things down on this silly blog.

*Oh, I won’t tell you how much I liked Titanic, when I first saw it in the theater, and cried, and saw it again, and cried again, and walked out on Santa Monica pier, like the character, and made a point of thinking about the character when I did. I felt, although I was plenty adult at the time, that I was getting in touch with my inner seventeen year old. I suppose I should be embarrassed recounting this. Well, what of it? It’s harmless enough, but, you know, I really did take it fairly seriously. Movies are funny like that – you see them at a certain period of your life and they are stamped with that period, completely and utterly, and they mean something to you, beyond anything in the film, itself.

“With an occasional exception, I focus on books that are out of print–and out of print for ten years or more.”

“With an occasional exception, I focus on books that are out of print–and out of print for ten years or more. There are a number of fine publishers -Persephone Books, Pushkin Press, Crippen and Landru, and, of course, New York Review Books, to name just a few – that are doing a service to past, present, and future by discovering and reissuing a wide variety of books that have been out of print or just out of the mainstream for years or decade.”

From the Neglected Book Blog.

brimful writes beautifully…..

Here.

 “The whir, whir of the blade rotating in its circles and the warmth of the cup of water and olive oil as it slowly drizzled into the mixture. All so simple, so elemental. Why does it matter, why does it matter, but it does. It forms a ball, the ball goes in a bowl, it is covered. Let it be; it rises. One firm push, and then let it rest. The technical word is, in fact, resting. It’s a living thing, this.”

“You’re like a character in a book!”

A bunch of us were sitting around the hospital cafeteria, the late lunch crew, chatting and lingering over the truly awful food, all while eyeing the clock . It turns out one of our group, a staff  member who sits ‘up front’ answering phones and logging in cases, is in a band. They sing in Spanish and at all kinds of community events – dances, parties, and weddings. She (the staff member) passed around her black-berry with pictures of the band. “She’s tried out for American Idol!” says one of the others and I am impressed.

“How did it go?”

“It was a couple years ago, they said they didn’t take people who sang in Spanish. Which is weird, because now they do.”

“You’re like a character in a book,” I say, and then feel slightly embarrassed because everyone looks a little confused. “I  mean, just that you remind me of a character in a book, you’re so quiet when you sit up front, and here you are in this popular local band and everything…..” Yeah, I’m not sure where I was going with it either, or what I meant by it, but everyone else just smiled and went on chatting until the clock hit 2:00. And then it was a mad rush to get back upstairs and finish work.

More book blogs

What a complete amateur* I am at the whole book thing. I’ve read nothing, it turns out! A bit in awe of voracious readers like this, really (got to this link from the Asylum blog).

*I spelled it amature, originally.
**The funny thing is, I thought I did spelchek. Why am I always the person that does stuff like this? Like the time I walked into a lamp-post, lampost, lamp post, er, telephone pole.

Revolutionary Road at the Walgreens

I bought a copy of Revolutionary Road last week, a big, fat, glossy paper-back copy of the novel, because it was sitting in the book rack at Walgreens, all mixed in with the Debbie Macombers and Janet Evanovichs. I thought it was funny to see a book about two people with great distaste for the “mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them” at a Walgreens. Serves those two right, actually.

*I’m only a fourth of the way in, and it’s a beautifully written book, stark, harsh and strangely poetic. There are spaces, quiet moments of reflection by Frank Wheeler, about his children and father, that I read and re-read. I don’t care for the two main characters, but I do pity them, which, I suppose, is the intent.

**Suburbia is just fine, excellence and beauty exist, and can be found  if someone bothers to look. When my brother and his wife lived in Tucson, during their medical residencies, I used to visit their little stucco house on a cul-de-sac; the sharp, clear desert sun turned everything into, well, not gold exactly, but a thing perfectly drawn, lines defined, details bared. A trip to the Walgreens would be all about the flipflops and airy cotton clothes, the air-conditioning of the store a shock after the heat outside. It all felt just as it should on a vacation visit to family: indolent, dreamy and safe. I used to get the best sushi in town, believe it or not……

Book blogs, Elizabeth Taylor, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

Shameless title above, designed to get search engine hits…

Anyway, I was searching for reviews of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (by Elizabeth Taylor, no, not the one you’re thinking of, the other one) when I found a great book blog. I have no time to read, of course, but, why should that stop me from buying more books?

Hospital vignettes

In the past several days, I saw:

1. Four female physicians, dressed in white coats, identical dress pants and shoes, same-length long, straight black hair, and sharply threaded brows. Similar make-up and purses. They looked like one doctor cloned into four separate physicians, and the four were sitting at a table in the cafeteria, one at each side of the ’square’, so that all the ‘clones’ could look at each other directly.

2. The med school cafeteria filled with first and second year medical students, and a few resident and attending physicians. The medical students looked relatively well rested and were eating all variety of healthy things. The resident and attending physicians had mostly fried, battered or breaded food on their plates.

3.  It was so cold today that there was ice on the INSIDE of the windows in the hallway to my office, and docs were wearing parkas over their white coats as they went from building to building, when, usually, they would chance the winter cold without a coat. It’s only a few steps between each hospital building.