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With our second oldest home recuperating from his first year of college before starting a full time job for eight weeks this summer, we've been watching a lot of movies. He signed up for a free trial of Netflix. I was the only one who stayed awake during the USS Indianapolis starring Nicholas Cage. Not my favorite actor but a powerful story. While it is tragic that so many men lost their lives, it is incredible that so many of them survived four days in the shark-infested waters. It is a tragedy that the captain was persecuted as a scapegoat for a tragedy that was something of a triumph. It is also a tragedy that it took so many years for the story to come out, but it is also a triumph that it was a twelve year old boy who rediscovered the story while he was doing a project for the National History Project competition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Indianapolis_(CA-35)#McVay.27s_record_cleared
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We also watched the first episode of Anne with an E. I've read the negative reviews and an interview with the writer/director, so I was curious about the series, and we sat down to watch it late one night this weekend after we watched Sully with the younger kids (a feel good hero's story, although the kids had trouble understanding why the Captain might be in trouble. In that regard it was similar to the USS Indianapolis movie). I would like to describe how shocking Anne with an E was, but it is simply disappointing. Rather than feel shocked, I just felt bored.
First of all, the intro with odd ochre colored collage animations is just weird. I didn't get it. I couldn't really hear the lyrics of the intro song, but it was a contemporary singer-songwriter genre song - music that I generally like, but doesn't seem to fit the show.
I did like the actress and actor who play Marilla and Matthew. The actress looks a lot like Colleen Dewhurst from the old version, but thinner and sharper featured. Both actresses play the role similarly, but if anything, this new actress seemed softer on Anne and seems to relent to liking her sooner than Dewhurst. Another nice scene was Marilla helping Anne learn to pray, and Anne's enjoyment of it. She exclaims she likes the Lord's prayer, and while that delight may be in the flowery language, it is also clear that she has a grateful heart. So it is a positive depiction of a religious element.
Meanwhile, the actress who plays Anne seemed uneven to me. At one minute she was pensive and thoughtful, but the next she was pushy and rude. When she was talking to Marilla about why she wouldn't apologize to Rachel Lynde, she seemed downright belligerent - more like a spoiled child, than one who has suffered as a serving girl and more immediately, who is in clear and present danger of losing her home and family. Especially when combined with the scenes of harsh treatment, it is hard to believe that Anne would be belligerent about apologizing. Megan Follows seemed more authentic, more a child of the period, than this actress, although her thin, homely appearance might suit the actual character better.
My final criticism would be the slow pacing. Frequent shots of waves and fields seem poorly lit, like amateurish cinematography, although probably intentionally dim. Green Gables seems overly isolated. The color and warmth of flowering spring trees aren't captured at all, and in fact, the flowers on the trees in the scene when Matthew and Anne first pass down the White Way look artificial.
Final verdict: disappointing and dull. No sense getting upset about the few flashbacks to Anne's harsh treatment because they weren't as dark as I expected (maybe in future episodes?). And while the dialogue stayed somewhat true to the book, some of the detours - like Anne being on the train when Marilla loses then finds her brooch, are so major that I fear all of the delight has been taken from the original and replaced with nothing of substance. It's been described as darker and more complex than the original. Darker, true; more complex - I don't think so.
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What do you do when you read a book that is disappointing? The one I just finished is repetitive and unsatisfying - too many fragments, too many uses of the rhetorical device when you repeat the beginning phrase like I'm doing here, and too little substance. And This: Too. Many. Sentences. Punctuated. Like. This. It read like a long blog post, which is not surprising since it is by a blogger. There were many references to other blogs and blogging, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the book is certainly limited to a certain time and a certain type of reader. Sometimes quotes were presented without an attribution. And there were lots of generalizations without many specific examples. I haven't read enough good books this year. Do I like bad fiction better than bad nonfiction? I think so.
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The book I did finish that I did enjoy was Redeployment by Phil Klay. It was and was not what I thought - a collection of stories about soldiers in Iraq with reflections about time and eternity - an opinion formed after reading a good interview with the author in Image magazine. It is a collection of short stories told from the perspective of different soldiers deployed to Iraq - a casualty officer, a chaplain, a hopeful contractor, a friend of a wounded warrior, a Marine sniper, a veteran going back to college. Very moving, but hard to read because of the darkness. Perhaps there is a note of hope, though often minimal, in the continued perseverance of many of the characters. Harsh language.
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Some belated notes on other earlier reads I liked:
Neil Gaiman's The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction includes introductions, book reviews, prize speeches at conventions, an interview with Lou Reed, music reviews of his wife's concerts - Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, - weird acknowledgement of her relationship with her former partner, but perhaps healthy understanding and appreciation of her differences.
I don't love everything Neil Gaiman writes, but I'm glad he writes it. I'm glad he promotes fairy tales and graphic novels and science fiction as genres that should survive and thrive and sometimes be taken seriously by literary critics. He creates imaginary worlds in his books that seem familiar because they are so closely related to the world of English Fairy Tales and Nordic tales and British Inklings' worlds. (see his essay "Once Upon a Time" about when fairy tales - Beowulf and The Odyssey and folk tales - were for adults) He seems to be unusually open and accessible to his fans on his blog and Twitter, which I only know because I read something in the Guardian. He lives in a gothic house in Wisconsin, but also in Cambridge, MA, where he teaches at Bard College and sometimes in England. Apparently, he is successful enough to have two homes.
His style is matter of fact, plain spoken, like having a conversation with a friend who wants you to like the things he likes. And some of the things he likes, I like or even love, and some things I don't think I'll ever read or enjoy, but I appreciate the reasons why he likes them. For a while, I read the essays in order, and then I skipped around and read different categories I liked best, until I think I read most or all of them. He mentions in the introduction that he writes with his baby on his lap, who "makes me feel vulnerable: old fears, long forgotten, creep out from shadowy places."
Some notes on essays:
"Why our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013" points out the connection between illiteracy and prison populations. "Literate people read fiction, and fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. ... And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thougths, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Reading is for communication and buidling empathy, shows a different world, an escape "Information has value, and the right information has enourmous value" now we are in an informatino glut Libraries aregates to the future. An obligation to support libraries, to read aloud to our children, to use the language, "to write true things" writers must write tales that readers can't stop reading, ... to daydream. . . . to imagine
"Telling Lies for a Living ... and Why We Do It" is his Newbery medal speech 2009. He claims he doesn't write stories for people to get through hard times (having received thanks for this) but because the story wants to get out,. but he does remember that "Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
"It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is."
"Reading is important,. Books are improtant. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.) It is a glorious and unlikely thing to be cool to your children. Children's ficiton is the most important fiction of all. ...We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different personl And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kndness, or comfort.
"It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is."
"Reading is important,. Books are improtant. Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.) It is a glorious and unlikely thing to be cool to your children. Children's ficiton is the most important fiction of all. ...We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different personl And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kndness, or comfort.
And that is why we write.""
His graduation speech, "Make Good Art," can be seen on Youtube, there's a video of this speech at University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2012. He never graduated from an institute of higher learning, yet it is one of the most widely distributed of his videos. He says, "Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways htat life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
Make good art."
Essays that made me want to learn more: "On Richard Dadd's The Fairy-Feller's Master-Stroke." a picture in the Tate Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite collection. Also inspired Angela Carter in a radio play and Christina Rossetti
Lud-in the Mist by Hope Mirrlees - an introduction and Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter.
I am not so much into sci-fi, but Gaiman provoked my interest in Terry Pratchett, Sandman, and Diana Wynne Jones. I too loved Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber is one I should have read. I've never read Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which seems to me to be a shortcoming in cultural literacy. He mentions loving Narnia, Tolkein, and Father Brown as a child, and Rudyard Kipling, who now is excoriated as a fascist and a racist. He also quotes Stephen King: "Trust the tale, not the teller." Interview with Stephen King was good. So was the article on"What the [Very Bad Swearword] IS a Children's Book, Anyway?"
He comments that authors are bad at answering questions because they give too many answers. Kids learn that words have power from swear words. They want to know about adult behavior, but they censor adult books themselves because they are boring. Coraline is only a children's book because his friend's daughter lied and said she wasn't scared of it, when she was terrified but wanted to hear the end. Adult books have the boring parts left in, a world comprehensible only to adults. Now I also want to read The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
He comments that authors are bad at answering questions because they give too many answers. Kids learn that words have power from swear words. They want to know about adult behavior, but they censor adult books themselves because they are boring. Coraline is only a children's book because his friend's daughter lied and said she wasn't scared of it, when she was terrified but wanted to hear the end. Adult books have the boring parts left in, a world comprehensible only to adults. Now I also want to read The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
The title essay, "The View from the Cheap Seats," was written after the 2010 Oscars - Coraline was nominated as best animated film - lost to Up.
The collection closes with death, with an homage to Terry Pratchett - after essays about his wife, Amanda Palmer, and his very good friend's death, and a trip to Syria, which touches on the suffering outside of the imagination.
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I love it when one of my kids introduces me to a book that I love. Coraline was one of these books, as is Mighty Jack, the new graphic novel from Ben Hatke.
I already knew Ben Hatke had a new book out. When Dan was in grad school, we went to church and were friends with his family. One of his younger sister's hosted a prayer group/play group at her house. His other little sister used to be our babysitter and we still love her album of songs she played at coffee houses. And ew spent a couple days at his parents' river house shortly before we left the area after graduation. We have the prolife book the Angel in the Water and the Zita books, and the charming Julia's House for Strange Creatures.
Now my son comes home from the school library with Mighty Jack which is a fun retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk story. It has as a main character a home schooled girl who fights with swords forged by her older brothers and carnivorous plants.
We can't wait for the next installment!
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