Friday, January 29

Saw a friend's show last night that didn't have much to recommend it, but who knows what it might have been under different circumstances?

I am listening to Where Men Win Glory on CD these days. Came to it because of my interest in the Tillman family, as Pat's younger cousin was a student of mine (and one of my dearest) a few years ago. I heard a lot about the events from her, even right as they were grappling with testimony and so on.

And actually I am finding it quite compelling--much better written than Into the Wild, and hats off, Krakauer, for that, and so far a skillful telling of a profound and far-reaching story. And what do you know, G, G, and S is kind of paying off as I feel more up to speed on world geography than before.

Am now at the part--6 chapters in, I guess--where Krakauer describes the founding of the Taliban. I never really thought about what the Taliban replaced: reprehensible and consciousless warlords. "No one ever talks about all the good things the Taliban does!"

Other than that, I'm not reading much, just working countless hours. Not watching much TV either, although we've squeezed in a few more hours of Lost and might be caught up in time for the new season.

And I have been trying to get up to speed on my Kindle. It's not hard, really, but there's learning the controls and then loading up some books and then actually reading, and with my schedule I'm still on Step 1.

Sunday, January 24

Finished: Guns, Germs, and Steel I never came around to this, much, and finished it only because I felt I must. I guess in the end I picked up some big-picture info I wouldn't have absorbed any other way, but I never did like this author's writing style or his apparent complete lack of wonder. I did dig--think I said this before--the too-short section on languages. And a chapter toward the end that outlines the development and structure of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states is interesting.
Edited to add, several weeks later: I think the CD I listened to most have been substantially abridged. Julian keeps mentioning whole ideas that weren't in the version I heard.

Finished: The Jane Austen Book Club

I seem to be inhabiting a fairly small literary world these days. Reading lots of Rex Stout and lots of Jane Austen, I suspect for the same reasons. And, as it turns out, Stout once said this, late in life, to his biographer, John J. McAleer: "I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don't think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen." Too true.

I know why I read them both: good sentences. I love good sentences. I could spend days in one, and sometimes do. I dream of writing one. Someday I hope to live in one.

Oh, and I know another reason. Both writers immerse you in orderly worlds, where there are rules and ways. Sometimes (often) those rules and ways are transgressed, and often therein lies the plot, but there is an elegant structure in Wolfe's daily schedule and his refusal to talk business at mealtime, just as in the way class inhabits and directs every interaction in Austen, and etiquette is--if sometimes breached--understood by all. In contrast, my life feels like constant chaotic disruptions against a backdrop of chaos.

So, anyway, I read Rex and Jane, and it turns out Rex loved Jane, and then I watch the Jane Austen Book Club movie, and that sends me back to reread the book. Which left me cold the first time, and which I find absolutely wonderful this time.

Saw: Where the Wild Things Are. Much discussed by Ryan and me, not so much by the boys.
Hamlet (CoHo Theater)--not an adaptation, but a skillful streamlining, lasting 2-1/2 hours with five superb actors. There were a couple of choices that didn't make sense to me, but overall: exquisite.

TV: too much, but the important ones are Lost (we're trying to get up to speed before the new season starts) and (dare I say it!) A Nero Wolfe Mystery (the only series I own complete, and I'm watching it for the first time, from beginning to end)

Reading: plays I'm working on (directing, not writing--well, I wrote one of them)
The Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of China, a kids book with a ton of great pictures

And just started listening to Where Men Win Glory

Also reading a crapload of email and catalog copy for work. Well, it has to be done.

J A B C Quotes

Dogeared from The Jane Austen Book Club

[Grigg, the one man in the club, says about Northanger Abbey, "there's something very pomo going on there."] "The rest of us weren't intimate enough with postmodernism to give it a nickname. We'd heard the word used in sentences, but its definition seemed to change with its context. We weren't troubled by this. Over at the university, people were paid to worry about such things; they'd soon have it well in hand."

"No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it. You see a campaign that focuses on chracter, rectitude, probity, and that's exactly when you should start asking yourself, What's this guy trying to hide?"

"When I was driving to the hospital," Sylvia said, "I thought if Allegra was all right I would be the happiest woman in the world. And she was, and I was. But today the sink is backed up and there are roaches in the garage and I don't have time to deal with any of it. The newspaper is filled with poverty and war. Already I have to remind myself to be happy. And you know, if it were the other way, if something had happened to Allegra, I wouldn't have to remind myself to be unhappy. I'd be unhappy for the rest of my life. Why should unhappiness be so much more powerful than happiness?"

Saturday, January 16

Novel this week was Some Buried Caesar, a Wolfe novel I picked because it is the first to feature Lily Rowan. She is quite a number in this book! And always, of course.

Seem to be sticking closely to comfort reading. Well, we had a rough week.

Listening to Guns, Germs, and Steel. More or less forcing myself to finish it despite finding it very boring. Except the section on language development, which could have been ten times longer and more detailed.

Also reading some stuff for work, but not yet in any orderly way.

Seeing: yesterday and today I watched 150 auditions. Ten (at most) were dazzling, ten (at most) were bad, and the rest were solid, respectable, watchable. I love actors, so it's not a bad way to spend time as far as I'm concerned.

Seeing: Natey and I watched G-Force once and Hotel for Dogs a half dozen times. The ending of H for D is sweet and makes me cry, but still in all I'd prefer not to watch it so much. Then again, rough week, and if Natey wanted to watch it while his Dad was gone and his Grandma was dying, why not?

Friday, January 8

Reading: Finished The League of Frightened Men a couple days ago. It's the second Nero Wolfe book (probably the 10th or 12th I've read), which means it's interesting to see how different it is stylistically from the later books. (Because of the war, there was a pretty big gap between the first two or three and the rest of the series.) Wolfe and Archie get a lot more lovable once Stout finds his stride, although the narrative voice here is still engaging, and it's cool to see space being carved out for some things we will come to count on. Mostly, what's great about this particular book is a really engaging premise--the client being not one person but a group of men who have reason to fear mortal threat from a really fascinating villain. What's startling, though not enough to put me off the book(s), is the unreconstructed attitude toward disability and people with disabilities. Paul Chapin is a villain because he's (as Archie refers to him many, many times) "a cripple," and he's suffered a crippling accident, it's suggested, because there was something wrong with him in the first place--a sort of inverted and overly intense character. Rex Stout, as progressive as he was in so many ways--and more so as the years went on and his writing spanned four decades--was not progressive in this way.

Seeing: Ryan and I are making our way through the most recent season of Lost. We dropped the thread halfway through last spring, but are picking it up now and really enjoying it.

And seeing: caught an early show of Up in the Air yesterday, which left me with no idea what all the fuss was about. After some overworked opening credits against an overworked version of "This Land is Your Land," the whole thing was thin and unsatisfying, save for one or two unexpected developments that hinted at what might have been. The two leading actors are fun to watch for their gorgeousness and charm, but Anna Kendrick, who was terrific in Camp was a one-joke attraction here.

I think it's a case where if I'd seen this out of the blue (on a plane, perhaps) without any expectations, it might have worked as a lightweight diversion. But because of its hype as a culturally significant blah blah blah, I left the theatre annoyed and baffled. That said, every year there is at least one major movie that gets tons of award attention but just leaves me cold or worse--Fargo, American Beauty, Forest Gump. To each his own, really.

I was able to read and see a ton over break and prior to rebooting this blog, but am clearly slowing down on both fronts now that I'm back at work. And working way too much already!!!

I started this particular blog almost two years ago when I wanted to post a lot of theatre-going notes at once, thinking then that I might or might not keep it up for notes on plays I read or saw. "Might not" has prevailed for a number of good reasons. But now I'm thinking it would be a handy place to keep a simple list of what I read or see from here on out. I may or may not write more, but at least, like my smart husband, I will have one place to track the plays, movies, books, other, that I read and see.

Today is the first of 2010. Today I finished watching The Jane Austen Book Club (which I liked enormously more than the book), and took Nathan and Cassidy to the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel this morning (which gave me a headache). (But the Percy Jackson trailer gave me goosebumps and made me cry a little.) I am in the middle of a Nero Wolfe book (as usual).

I am also alternating between two books on CD in the car: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (which everyone but me seems to find fascinating) and Ken Robinson's The Elment (fun and interesting and frustrating so far in that (the frustrating part) it's a lot about the current bollocks of our approach to education).