what we have here is a failure to communicate

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | June 6, 2011

Movie Mayhem: May

I spent some time this month either keeping up with, or catching up on new and recent movie releases – which left relatively little time for tracking down older and more obscure films. The oldest movie I watched was from 1997, and 12 out of 20 were made either this year or last year. It was a fun month of movie watching, one that included Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, The Green Hornet, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Thor, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole, Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech, Avatar, Faster, Hanna, Cedar Rapids, and The Saint – as well as re-watches of favorites like How to Train Your Dragon, Stardust, The Rundown, Tortilla Soup, and Kick-Ass. I would be happy to tell you what I thought or answer questions about any of these movies in the comments, so please pipe up if you are curious.

While some of the movies listed above were great, or at the very least interesting or entertaining, here are the movies that I actually feel like talking about today:

no man's land No Man’s Land (Writ. & Dir. Danis Tanovic. Stars Branko Djuric and Rene Bitorajac. Bosnia/France/others, 2001.) After reading one of Caroline’s excellent reviews I tracked this film down. A darkly funny movie about the day-to-day foolishness of war, it places two Bosnian soldiers and a Serbian soldier in a a foxhole together between enemy lines, and waits to see what happens. How they all got in their predicament is terribly amusing (emphasis on terribly of course), and as the creaking, un-greased wheel of military protocol, as well as UNPROFOR politics and media machinations grinds into gear in an attempt to save them, there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind that all will not end well. The fact that the fellows playing the trapped soldiers can carry the film so well is amazing. I was caught up in their quarrels and moments of near-companionship, and was rooting (rather hopelessly) for all of them. The story is absurd, but then so is life – especially in times of war…

The Concert (Dir. Radu Mihaileanu. Writ. Radu Mihaileanu, Matthew Robbins, and Alain-Michel Blanc. Stars Aleksey Guskov, Melanie Laurent, and Dmitri Nazarov. France/Russia, 2009.) This is another absurd story, but in this case it is REALLY absurd. Andrei is the cleaning man at the Bolshoi orchestra, but 30 years ago he was its renowned conductor. He was fired for refusing to let his Jewish musicians go. He intercepts an invitation from the Châtelet Theater in Paris and decides to gather together his former musicians and secretly go to perform in place of the current Bolshoi orchestra. The aged musicians, plucked from off the street, out of gypsy camps, from retirement homes and death’s door, head to Paris with instruments bought from some obscure source and on passports that were written up at the airport. (What?) Andrei insists that their soloist must be the young violin star Anne-Marie Jacquet, and she mysteriously agrees. Then with only a bit of further ado, they all wind up on stage and without a single rehearsal can suddenly play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major as perfectly as they did 30 years before. (What???) Okay, so there is the magic of destiny at work here, but it’s a rather long stretch. I wanted to believe in it, but couldn’t. Fortunately the concert part of The Concert is splendid. The piece sounds amazing – the violin solo especially – and the only real bit of wonder in the film is that Melanie Laurent looks like she is really and truly playing the violin. I was so impressed that I had to look it up, and it turns out that she petty much really did play, although in the film one of her hands was a stunt hand. In the end I rather liked this movie because of the lovely music – I just wish the story had been more believable.

Uncorked (Writ. & Dir. John Huddles. Stars Rufus Sewell, Minnie Driver, and Nigel Hawthorne. USA, 1998.) And a final absurd movie – I saw this one when I was 13 or so and really liked it. Since then I have tried to track it down again, but there is some confusion about the titles which made this difficult. It appears to have three titles – Uncorked was the VHS title, and the title I eventually came across on Netflix. Higher Love was the cable TV title, and it is listed on IMDb as At Sachem Farm. ??? Anyway, a re-watch proved it to be just as amusing as I remembered. Rufus Sewell plays Ross, the only “responsible” member of a family that includes Uncle Cullen, a would-be philosopher who likes to spends days on top of a giant pedestal, and his brother Paul, who disappeared into the further reaches of the family estate to build an arboretum and reappears only rarely to ask for more expensive trees. Ross wants to sell off the family’s nearly priceless wine collection so that he can purchase a (failed) mine which he believes could make him rich. His girlfriend (Minnie Driver) is growing tired of him and her eyes are drifting back toward their neighbor, a failed Olympic diver who was her first love. As Ross battles the eccentric plotting of his Uncle, who seems determined to foil his plans, and tries to set up his brother with the mysterious and beautiful guest whom his girlfriend brought along for a visit, he begins to sense that there are bigger forces at work around him. In causal, drop-by scenes full of overheard and fragmented conversations, the characters all grope to understand who they are and what they want from life, while the glorious Californian sun throws a warm glow over it all. The story is a bit understated, rather implausible, but in a funny charming way. My only complaint is that I found the music to be a distraction. Not that it was bad, it just didn’t seem to quite fit – although the part where Ross picks up his guitar and plays is awesome. Good stuff overall. I’m glad I found this one again.

Having sufficiently caught up on new and recent releases, I am hoping to watch a more eclectic mix of movies in the next few months. Although given my hefty reading plans for this month I may be cutting back on my movie intake somewhat. We’ll see!

8 Comments

Posted in Foreign Films, Movie Mayhem, Movies, Non-sense | Tags: No Man's Land, The Concert, Uncorked

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | June 1, 2011

Wanderer Above Jordan Pond

Today we had a proper thunderstorm. These things are few and very far between in this state. My boss and I left our work to fend for itself and stood outside watching the sky before the rain hit. The sky looked…somewhat apocalyptic:

It was AWESOME! I literally jumped up and down and squealed when it started to thunder. What was fun and games for me was less so for others. (I heard a tornado warning on the radio on my way home tonight…!!!) Trees came down around town, buildings were hit by lightening… Yikes. After the excitement of the morning the wind kept barreling around for the rest of the day, although the sun came winking back out through the afternoon. By the time I left work it was looking stormy again, although not apocalyptic. I decided that it was the perfect time to go do this:

wanderer

I took the Park Loop Road through the tunnelous trees to the trail on the backside of the South Bubble, and then crossing my fingers in hopes that it wouldn’t storm on me, I went dashing up the mountain (which at a mere 766 ft. is charmingly dashable). At the top the wind sent me romping, roiling up over the bald granite summit and buffeting me most thrillingly. In true dorky style, I struck a Friedrichesc pose which lasted about half a second before the wind tumbled me on down the trail.

Give a shout-out for wildness folks. All that nature. Love it. After this I’m off to read Wordsworth – now there’s a fellow who gets nature!

2 Comments

Posted in Acadia, Adventure, Art, Bar Harbor, Book related, Hiking/Walking, Maine, MDI, Non-sense, Photography, Weather | Tags: Friedrich, South Bubble, thunder storm, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 31, 2011

What Ever Happened to Modernism?

modernism?? by Gabriel Josipovici

I need more practice reading essays and works of criticism. And also, one of these days I intend to take a class on literature of some type so that I can learn how to think more critically about what I read. I reason all right overall, but my education has been haphazard at best and while I feel generally up to speed on many things, occasionally I encounter something that shoves me into the deep end of the pool. I end up flailing around there a bit – enthusiastically though. One of these days I’ll get the hang of swimming, and critical thought.

I’m not stressing about this since I know that honestly I just don’t have a lot of the pieces yet. (After all, I missed your standard highschool English classes, and have thus far not stepped foot into the college classes I dream of.) Therefore, I came away from my encounter with Whatever Happened to Modernism? with the beginnings of a sense of what Josipovici was getting at, and a reading list full of authors I had never heard of before – authors I am eager to check out. I have never particularly cared about Modernism. I wouldn’t have known it if it tripped me in the street. In my slap-a-dash way I have careened through the worlds of art and music and literature and have begun to get a sense of what I like, but I’m still thrillingly uncertain about why I like what I like. In a way, that’s actually what this book is about.

In Whatever Happened to Modernism? Josipovici explores what he likes, and why. Sure, he is making a case for the origin and history, glory days and twilight of Modernism as it all unfolded – in his opinion. He debates over what Modernism is in all its varying forms – art, music, and literature – and discusses how it got that way and how it succeeded and failed. Even to a total noob like me he is rather persuasive and entertaining. He tells an interesting story, full of artists and musicians and writers who are fantastic and freaky. Several of my fellow Wolfish readers have responded to Josipovici’s arguments with intriguing and insightful comments of their own, and do please check them out. As for me, I kind of have to take his word for it, at least for the moment.

For me, this book was a fascinating glimpse into another person’s journey toward discovering why they like what they like. It was kind of an exciting trip. I picked up quite a few souvenirs, and met some interesting people. I didn’t mind traveling with Josipovici, even if I got a bit lost along the way and couldn’t always follow what he was saying. I have friends like this in real life (both ones who launch into detailed descriptions of M.A.S.H. only to be informed that I didn’t watch TV as a kid so I have no idea what they’re on about, and ones who earnestly talk about Kafka while I nod along and vow to push him closer to the top of my TBR list). The book certainly stimulated my interest in art in the twentieth century, which means that according to the book jacket it succeeded. I’m very pleased that I read it (thanks for picking it for this month’s Wolfish read, Frances!)

In the interest of going on liking what I like ‘largely because of who and what I am‘, I’ll mention a few things I especially liked about Whatever Happened to Modernism?:

My favorite chapter was 5, I Heard The Murmur And The Murmuring Sound, which was mostly about Wordsworth and his poetry. I went straight out and borrowed a collection of his poems from the library which I intend to dive into tomorrow.

I LOVE the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, seen to the right here. It makes me want to go striding out into the wilds and be buffeted by wind and weather.

I like these two quotes –
‘…vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and…though vision may be the goal it does not subsime life but is only one moment, one experience, within life.‘ p. 60

‘…are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something that blinkers us or which sharpens our vision?‘ p. 187

I’m always going on about following threads, so you are right in assuming that this book is for me the center of a huge web of threads that I’ll be busy following for quite awhile. I have authors to look for and books to read before I get round to asking “Whatever happened to Modernism?” again, but I don’t doubt that I will return to the question. I’ll meet you back here when I do.

Join The Wolves next month when we read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

5 Comments

Posted in Authors, Books, Gabriel Josipovici, Non-Fiction, Non-sense, Reading, Reading Challenges, Scholarly Pursuits, The Wolves | Tags: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 23, 2011

We must not look at goblin men

So the other day I was watching an episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor was trying to take a vacation from his “normal” adventures but of course wound up in a stranded tour bus on an unfamiliar planet with a group of terrified tourists and something else. One of the women appeared to be possessed and was repeating everything that everyone said, speaking so close to simultaneously that it wasn’t possible that she was just being funny. Out of the blue, a character named Dee Dee piped up with some poetry (which Sky Silvestry, the possessed woman, eerily echoed):

Dee Dee Blasco, Sky Silvestry: We must not look at goblin men.
Biff Cane, Sky Silvestry: What’s that supposed to mean?
The Doctor, Sky Silvestry: It’s a poem. Christina Rossetti.
Dee Dee Blasco, Sky Silvestry: We must not look at goblin men / We must not buy their fruits / Who knows upon what soil they fed / Their hungry, thirsty roots?
The Doctor, Sky Silvestry: Actually, I don’t think that’s helping.

Following the natural course of things as they tend to happen in my world, I went diving for pen and paper and jotted down a note to remind me to look this up later. During my next trip to the library I therefore found myself poking round in the basement, and then up on a rickety stool where jammed between other equally tattered old books, I found a tiny blue one with gold on the edges of its pages. The cover was literally held on by the “BSMT 821 ROS” sticker on the spine. Poems of Christina Rossetti the cover whispered. When I brought it upstairs the library director herself was surprised to see it, and we exclaimed together over the 1913 publication date. All that seems rather lovely and magical to me, in a completely wonderfully ordinary way.

Apparently Rossetti was fairly prolific and enjoyed critical and public praise from the publication of her first poems in th 1850s until she died in 1894. Her most well known poem was the one I wanted – Goblin Market. A long poem, it was written as a fairy story for children, and is about two sisters who come dangerously close to losing themselves to the spells of the goblins.

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
‘Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:

Critics are all over the place about what the poem means, suggesting that it is an expression of Rossetti’s feminist political views, or makes a statement about female sexuality in relation to Victorian social mores, or the exclusion of women from the world of the arts, or that it is a criticism of Victorian marriage markets, or the rise of advertising in pre-capitalist England… There is a sense of the moralistic story to it, but instead of having the girl who slips up and sins die in the end to prove the danger of giving in to temptation, Rossetti lets her be saved by her sister, live, and go on to have a happy marriage and children. It’s a nice poetic adventure where sisterly devotion saves the day – with a whole lot of rather suggestive imagery. I for one have never eaten a piece of fruit with quite that much sucking involved, nor have I been eager to have a sibling lick juice off my cheeks and neck. Um. Goblin Market does seem to be more than just a children’s fairy story, but what it is exactly is beyond me.

‘Oh,’ cried Lizzie, ‘Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men.’
Lizzie covered up her eyes,
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
‘Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.

Having followed this thread and tracked down this poem, I am left feeling shruggish. I don’t particularly care for this or any of the other poems I have read. There is little about Rossetti’s phrasing or imagery or rhymes that speak to me, and I’m not particularly interested in her devotional or romantic pieces. So I think I’ll leave it at that, and close the little blue book with its pages edged in gold and move on to the next thread. Christina Rossetti can keep her goblins.

4 Comments

Posted in Authors, Book design, Books, Christina Rossetti, Doctor Who, Famous People, Non-sense, Poetry, Reading | Tags: Goblin Market, Jesup Memorial Library, midnight, Poems of Christina Rossetti

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 16, 2011

Invisible Cities

invisible cities by Italo Calvino
translated by William Weaver

Conversations (both spoken and pipe smoke signaled) between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo – tales of Polo’s travels and all the cities he has seen – fill the few pages of this slim book. Polo’s stories of cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and design, cities and the dead, continuous cities, are told like dreams half remembered. At times the Great Khan understands them to be his own dreams, at other times he believes Polo describes not many cities but only one.

I enjoyed my first Calvino quite a bit. There were passages that merely amused or diverted me, and others that made me sit up and exclaim with delight or recognition. For a lover of details, this was a delectable tray of tantalizing treats. Descriptions of architecture, strange sights and sounds, odd chance encounters. Calvino explores space and time and memory, and just as Polo’s tales are simple and pleasing bits of distraction for the aged and tired mind of Kublai, so Calvino pokes and prods and points out in a way that slips into your mind under your very nose.

Calvino is the third author on my Oulipo reading list, a project that I am rather haphazardly pursuing. It is the richness of the details that I am seeing as a common thread between Perec, Queneau, and Calvino thus far. That, and startling bits of beauty amidst playful (even seemingly silly) word-craft.

Here’s a portion that I particularly liked – in fact it’s a spot where while reading Invisible Cities I found myself, at the end of the section, giving a crow of sharp, quick, kind of triumphant laughter, and then quite suddenly feeling the prick of tears. A brilliant moment:

‘Hidden Cities
In Raissa, life is not happy.‘ (Polo goes on to describe a place of daily frustrations and misery.) ‘And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs to see a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, “Darling, let me dip into it,” to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and happier still his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: “Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.‘

The details, the patterns, the weave of the fabric that is life all strung together. Perec and Queneau and Calvino saw it and shared it in a way that helps me to see it better, and for that I thank them, and for that reason I’ll continue to read them.

23 Comments

Posted in Authors, Books, Famous People, Non-sense, Novels, Oulipo, Reading, Scholarly Pursuits | Tags: Invisible Cities, Perec, Queneau

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 13, 2011

The Maine State Parks Project

I just came up with a new fun way to further explore my home state: This year I’m going to try to go to as many of the state parks as I can. I believe there are about 26 of them, and I think I’ve only been to 7. Obviously I have my work cut out for me.

Today I kicked off my adventure with a pleasant trip to Lamoine State Park, a lovely bit of beach and grassy fields and woods that overlooks Frenchman’s Bay and offers a great view of Mount Desert Island. I spent over an hour puttering about taking pictures and enjoying the dandelions and sea breeze. I was the only person there aside from an elderly man walking his dog, an employee on a distant mower, and the lady at the entrance gate, who was working on a quilt on a picnic table outside the gatehouse. She told me to keep an eye out for “the eagle” but I didn’t see it. However there were plenty of other things to place in my mental scrapbook:

6 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Hiking/Walking, Local/Community, Maine, Non-sense, Photography, The Maine State Parks Project, Traveling | Tags: Lamoine State Park

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 11, 2011

Ribbony Asparagus Salad

Another winner from Smitten Kitchen. I’ve been obsessively thinking about making this since I saw the recipe last week – I loved the look of the ribbons of asparagus, even though I have not been known to eat much of that particular veggie. Turns out, I like it much better raw. In this salad it is crunchy and crisp and you can wind it around your fork – exciting food! I used dry roasted almonds instead of toasted pine nuts, but otherwise followed Deb’s inspiration faithfully. I made this tonight after work, and it was quick and easy and so satisfying. Making those ribbons of asparagus was almost more fun than eating them! As Deb said, this salad is a lovely celebration of the veggie and the spring season.

5 Comments

Posted in Food, Non-sense, Photography, Weather | Tags: asparagus. Smitten Kitchen, salad

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 10, 2011

Cranberry-Walnut-Ramps Chicken Salad, or How I Spent This Rainy Day

I’m so much better about utilizing days off now that I’m working than I ever was before (like when I had three months off straight recently…!) Today I slept luxuriously until 9 o’clock, then I took the returnables in (and was pleasantly surprised by the kindness of the strangers who helped me unload my car while their own bottles were being counted).

I took myself out to breakfast at Martha’s Diner, and went grocery shopping and beer shopping (hurray for money from the returnables!) and book shopping at Scotties Used Books (I picked up some Agatha Christie mysteries, and a Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Whimsey novel, as well as a collection of short stories by Tobias Wolff).

Back home and sick of the cold and damp I built a fire and arranged some flowers to sunny up the place, in spite of my cat Bree’s best efforts to hamper me. Then I took pictures with my iPhone and played with them in my new favorite app, Instagram, while sampling Rising Tide Brewing‘s Ursa Minor Stout (yummy!).

And finally (so far) I made a chicken salad. I discovered Smitten Kitchen a few weeks ago and love Deb’s mix of fantastic food photography and great sounding recipes. I finally got around to trying one today. I can’t abide touching raw chicken, so I had to beg CP to cook me up some. He did so most accommodatingly the other day. I followed Deb’s recipe pretty closely, with one major adaptation – I used the dehydrated ramps that I brought back from West Virginia with me last month in place of the shallots. The salad is really good, if I do say so myself. I ate a bit for lunch on a bed of romaine and spinach. We’ll see just how strong the ramp flavor is by dinnertime, but I’m pretty sure the concoction will only get better.

My final project for the day is deciding if I will watch No Man’s Land or the rest of Doctor Who season 4… Cheers!

6 Comments

Posted in Beer, Book related, Books, Brewery, Doctor Who, Food, Movies, My cats, Non-sense, Personal, Photography, Weather | Tags: Bree, chicken salad, days off, Martha's Diner, ramps, Rising Tide Brewing Company, Scotties Used Books, shopping, Smitten Kitchen

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 8, 2011

Kraken

kraken
by China Mieville

This book was exactly what The Doctor ordered (yes, that doctor). I’ve been meaning to return to the weird worlds of China Mieville ever since reading Un Lun Dun last August. Inspired (now twice in a row) by Isabella of Magnificent Octopus (whose review of Kraken is here), I picked this 500+ page deep sea monster of a novel up from the library piles on Tuesday and was promptly, er, sucked in (tentacles being rather difficult to extract one’s self from…)

Oh my goodness, gracious. Mieville has reached new heights on the outrageousness scale (at least in my somewhat limited but enthusiastic opinion). Here we have a London where end-of-the-world scenarios crop up every other day, and every cult has its own honest-to-god god. However, one particular apocalypse is looming rather larger than these types of things usually do, and the giant squid carefully preserved at the Natural History Museum has gone missing, which really upsets the Krakenists. Beneath the lapping waves of the lives of your average London citizen, eruptions and earthquakes rock the floor of the ocean, a.k.a. the vast secret society of those who can work magik and knackery. The memory angels are on the warpath, the familiars are striking, the Tattoo is menacing, the Londonmancers are no longer neutral, and Billy Harrow (who not that long ago was merely a curator) is the focus of a personhunt headed up by the Chaos Nazis and (all the gods forbid) the fearsome Goss and Subby (easily one of the best/most horrible villainous pair I’ve ever encountered).

Mieville’s stuff is pretty freakishly awesome. The characters he comes up with (momentarily glimpsed or roaring repeatedly off the page) are not lacking in distinctive features. The monsters and mayhem he creates are ridiculous and inventive, but at the same time his world is still solidly anchored in ours – Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Amy Winehouse all have parts to play here, as do friendship and trust and the sense that there is something bigger than (or as big as) just ordinary life at work here.

Mieville used his words in ways that I haven’t read before, so not only was the story rollicking good fun, it was also constantly tickling and startling my mind with turns of phrase and invented words and weirdly wonderful speech patterns.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this one and will of course be knocking on Mieville’s door again in the future. Having gotten my fill of fantastical worlds for the moment though (what with all the Doctor Who viewing, and then this book) I am eagerly embarking on a new adventure: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I’m a few (tiny) chapters in, and I already love it.

Enjoy your Sunday reading folks and friends and fantastic beings!

17 Comments

Posted in Authors, Books, China Mieville, Doctor Who, Non-sense, Novels, Reading | Tags: Kraken, Un Lun Dun

Posted by: Sally Ingraham | May 4, 2011

Prickly Spring

One of my favorite things about spring is how you notice things in a new way. On a hike recently, I couldn’t get over how yellowy-green this tree was:

After a color starved winter, it was like I had never seen such greenness before. And I came to a shocked stop before this:

Such pretty thorns! Maroon branches bristling with vigor and fierce GROWTH – spring popping the last pretense of winter. By all means, have at it!