TiVo Lady

Boomer Halloween

Being a Boomer, I have survived at least 50 Halloweens.  So, at this point, I've had enough of them.  I don't buy candy;  I don't decorate;  I don't answer the doorbell.  Call me Halloween Curmudgeon, I don't mind.

Still, I can appreciate a fine artistic Halloween effort when I see one.  And this is that.  By the way, it's all homemade, from what appears to be garbage bags, twine, and hoses.  It's a house-sized spider.

Proud

RioGringa may or may not follow in TiVoLady's writerly footsteps.  Whatever.  But she was just published, in a Chicken Soup for the Soul anthology, called, "Teens Talk Getting In...To College," with an essay about being wait listed almost everywhere.

Brava RioGringa!  (She also got more than 5,000 hits on her blog this week--a cause not only of maternal pride, but more than a little maternal jealousy, too!!)

Open Letter to Neal Stephenson

Dear Neal:

I really, really love your work.  Cryptonomicon, your 918-page-long book masterpiece, is one of my all-time, favorite novels ever!!!  (Insert inappropriate gushing here.)  Plus, you are a Boomer, born in 1959.  Awesome!!

That's why I was so excited to snag a copy of Anathem, your most recent--most incredibly 935-page-long latest work.  Until I began to read it, that is.  Then, I was, uh, horrified?  Amazed?  No, the correct word would be:  stupified.

I really really really wanted to love this book.  And I tried, truly I did.  I made it to page 296, and most of the time I felt as if I had a gun pointed to my head, with you yelling in my ear:  Read, Read, or Else!!!

I can't even begin to explain what this book is about, mostly because I HAVE NO IDEA.  Here's why:

"Then he used Hypotrochian Transquaestiation on me:  he had changed the subject in such a way as to imply that the question had just been settled--that he had won the point and I had lost.  So back to my question:  does Sammann do anything else on the table that sends you a message -- or at least indicates he knows that his image is being recorded?'"

Huh??

At first, I began to think that I just wasn't smart enough to read this book.  I tried and tried.  And then, I got to this:

"The library grape had been sequenced by the avout of the Concent of the Lower Vrone in the days before the Second Sack..."

And I started to realize that maybe I would never understand your book, and that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't my fault that I had no clue what the hell you were talking about.  I realized that I could actually stop reading, too, because NOBODY WAS FORCING ME TO FINISH.

A blissful epiphany. 

Sorry, Neal.  I tried...

XXX

TiVoLady

Cheesy Weepfest

Okay, The Secret Life of Bees was cheesy.  Okay, The Secret Life of Bees was a ridiculous weepfest.  And, okay, the absurd theme of The Secret Life of Bees was that it's the job of strong black women to take care of weak, helpless white women.  (Oh, and by the way, not in a single Boomer in sight in The Secret Life of Bees, not even the 39-year-old director....No, wait.  How could I forget?  The novel was written by Boomer Sue Monk Kidd, so the movie's reason for being is Boomer-ish.  So there!)

But, still.  There's the Queen (as in Latifah), and a surprisingly effective child actress, Dakota Fanning.  Also, the wrongly song-free Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys, who should probably not be allowed to act in a movie unless they can also sing in said movie.  (Simply because it's a complete waste of talent.)

(By the way, when you go see a WeepFest, it's a good idea to bring tissues.  TiVoLady forgot her Kleenex, which is why she ended up trying to sop up her teary eyes and drippy nose with a wet wipe from a Japanese restaurant--the only vaguely absorbent item available, other than her semi-Spandexed sleeve.  Not. A. Good. Idea.)

Anyway, the story is an engaging lost mother/loveless daughter tale that's embroidered with race relations in the Deep South in the 1960's, genteel poverty, bee-keeping, young love, and a mythic African faith...

And what Boomer Woman would not cry about a girl who's lost her mother at the age of four, never knowing if she'd been loved or abandoned?  Very Oprah-esque it was.  Also, very satisfying.

Slumdog Millionaire!!!

Just saw a very advance screening of Slumdog Millionaire, and sweet and funny indy Indian movie that won't be released here until mid-November.  It's directed by Boomer Brit Danny Boyle (born in 1956), who also directed Millions and 28 Days Later and Trainspotting. Not only was Mr. Boyle at the screening, but so was Dev Patel, the 18-year-old British star of the movie. What a thrill!!  The movie studio, Fox Searchlight, is hoping that this little independent movie will become the next Juno or Little Miss Sunshine.  And if the life were fair, it would...

The movie is Dickensian in scope and feel, with a rags to riches plot (or "rags to raja" as they put it here), close calls, evil-doers, sweet young girls, betraying young men, children in peril, and everybody getting what they deserve at the end.  (The older I get, the more I feel that all of real life should become Dickensian.)

(On an unrelated note, the two young guys sitting in front of us were playing with their iPhones before the film began.  The first guy turned his phone sideways, and pointed it at his friend as the following message spilled out, very slowly, like a news crawl:  "how . . .are. . . u...?"  The friend said, "Can't you make it go faster?"  Then, the friend conjured up an image of a burning candle on his iPhone, held it up, and as he slowly turned it, the flame moved slowly sideways, is if it were a completely real fire.  Then, he waved it in the air.  Boys with their toys.)

Back to Slumdog.  The movie is set in Bombay, now Mumbai, and focuses on two Muslim brothers, soon to be orphans.  It's full of color and movement--as Boyle said, he wanted his film to seem like flowing water, and it does.  There are loud and raucous chase scenes, and a vibrant musical score, and peril and danger, and betrayal and love, all in an incredibly exotic setting.  I walked out of the theatre feeling as if I'd taken a little mini-trip to India, but without the diarrhea or jetlag.

Note to RioGringa:

Dear Ms. RioGringa (denizen of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil):

Living, as you do, in a tropical paradise, you may not remember "seasons."  Or the one we're in now, called "fall."  Leaves are falling.  There's frost on the ground.  And although we are in neither the tropics, or in paradise, it does look like this.

Close up, it's this:
and this:

And you would have seen this, too:  a little white dog on a frozen, white field:

And, if you'd been here with me early this morning, you'd have seen this, steam included: (Yep, that's what you think it is...)

Love you and miss you,

Your Mama

More Than It Hurts You

If my eyeballs seem about to fall out of my head, that's because they are.  I've read three novels in five days....Mostly because they were so good, I couldn't put them down.

More Than It Hurts You, by Darin Strauss, is the latest in my around-the-clock reading trio, and it's a surprisingly great read.  It's the story of Josh and Dori Goldin, a yuppie Long Island Jewish couple with a baby, Josh, and their pediatric emergency confrontation with Darlene Stokes, an African American pediatrician.

See, Josh has blood in his vomit, or not, and then he passes out, and the whole thing is a little funky, but he gets better.  The book is an amazingly insightful portrait of Josh and Dori's marriage.  There are passages that reflect points I've made in my not-yet-published book about marriage, only done in a much more clever way.  Like this:

...Josh "..had to admit:  Before teh incident, he'd treated housework/parenting stuff/Dori's needs/etc. like mosquitoes."

Or there's this:  "forgetting was the membership fee you paid to remain in the happy marriage club."

Or when Josh complains to Dori about having to rinse plates before he puts them in the dishwasher, and then squints, "as if confused by the unfairness of it all, his one chore of the day....Men could drive you crazy.  It's like they expect that, if you clean a dish once, it should remain clean forever."

Finally, there's this:

"What's impossible to communicate, what you can't experience unless you're part of it, is the sensation of being in a real-life marriage.  Even little chats seem to be floating in some kind of really vast liquid, and that vast liquid is the ocean of shared feelings and memories and shorthands, of understandings and misunderstandings between the couple--their history ocean."

Though I had some minor quibbles with the plot--baby in jeopardy themes irritate the heck out of me--when the writing is this good, all is forgiven.

Brilliant Indignation

Philip Roth's latest book, booklet/pamphlet/thing, Indignation, is a gem in miniature.  Only 231 pages long--and the pages are half-size--the work is more like a long short story than a novel, but I'm not  complaining.  Roth needs only five words where any other writer would need fifteen or fifty to say the same thing.  It's as if his writing has become so condensed, so distilled, that all that's left are pure, transparent crystals. 

For example, here's Marcus Messner, the 18-year-old kosher butcher's son from Newark, New Jersey.  He's the protagonist and a sophomore at Winesburg College, in Ohio, and he's trying to figure why Sonny Cottler, a senior and varsity basketball player wants Marcus to join the frat.

Sonny ..."had that smooth, confident, easygoing way about him that reminded me of all those magically agreeable, nice-looking boys who'd served as president of the Student Council back in high school and were worshiped by girlfriends who were star cheerleaders or drum majorettes.  Humiliation never touched these youngsters, while for the rest of us it was always buzzing overhead like the fly or the mosquito that won't go away.  What did evolution have in mind by making but one out of a million look like the boy standing before me?  What was the function of such handsomeness expect to draw attention to everyone else's imperfection?" 

Every single word matters--there's nothing superfluous or wrong or out of place.  Roth has been called the greatest living American writer, and that might actually be true.  What's even more amazing, and rarely mentioned, is that the man is now 75 years old.  And he's still churning out novels, at a clip much faster than most Americans read books.  This is his twenty-ninth novel:  as in 29.

I had to forcibly force myself to read this s-l-o-w-l-y, so as not to miss a word.  Like this precise description of the Jewish family's view of divorce, circa 1951.

"Breaking up a family with a divorce was virtually a criminal act.  Growing up, I'd never known of a single household among my friends or my schoolmates or our family's friends where the parents were divorced or were drunk or, for that matter, owned a dog.  I was raised to think all three repugnant."

But what's most shocking and horrifying and unexpected about this book is where it goes at the end, broadly hinted midway through, though I refused to believe it until the (very) bitter end.  I won't give it away, but it's a very brave, very unusual, and very ....terrifying choice for an author to make.

The last lines of the book are these:

(he had)..."postponed learning what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along:  of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result."

In context, this truth stabs your heart, rips it out, and tosses it aside.  Roth Rules.

A Most Wanted Man; A Most Unwanted Ending

I have loved the writing of John Le Carre for decades.  His trilogy about British spy George Smiley is just about the best espionage writing ever.  That's why I was delighted to snag a copy of A Most Wanted Man, Le Carre's latest, post-Cold War, post 9/11 effort to modernize and update the Spying on  Bad Guys genre.

Le Carre places the focus of Muslim terror and financial deception and international intrigue in Hamburg, Germany, where "espiocrats from our own distinguished foreign intelligence service" have missed the boat completely on 9/11, and still feel the sting of that enormous failure.

"We thought we could charm them across the line to us.  We thought we could lure them with our good faces and fat wallets.  We sat in car parks all fucking night, waiting for high-level defectors to get into the backseat and cut a deal with us.  Nobody showed up.  We trawled the airwaves to break their codes.  They hadn't got any fucking codes.  Why not?  Because we weren't fighting the Cold War anymore.  We were fighting off-cuts of a nation called Islam with a population of one and a half billion and a passive infrastructure to match.  We thought we could do it the way we'd done it before, and we were plain, stupid, fucking wrong."

So far, so good.  The premise is intriguing, the writing superb, and the characters are fully alive and fascinating.  Like Bachmann, the chief old-school spy, who sets up a trap for Issa, the Chechen son of ;Karpov, a dead millionaire Russian mobster, whose savings are housed in a British bank owned by Tommy Brue.  Issa's lawyer, Annabel Richter, an upright, brilliant do-gooder.  They plot to divert Issa's millions into Muslim charities, on the advice of a Muslim scholar who lives in Germany, Dr. Abdullah.

Bachmann is the mastermind of this elaborate sting, but the event occurs so close to the book's end, the reader knows that something has to go wrong.  (After all, there are only 20 or 30 pages left--a very bad sign.)  And it does go wrong, big time.  The worst part, though, is that the real (new) Bad Guys here are us.  It's the Americans who screw the pooch, undermining Bachmann's clever deception and long-term plan to entrap and coerce the Muslim pseudo-terrorists.

But I really hate being the scapegoat.  Even at the hands of a brilliant writer like Le Carre.  Please, sir, I'd like a do-over to the ending of this book.  Please?

W. ... (wake me when it's over)

Boomer director Oliver Stone's movie about Boomer-in-Chief, George Bush, is called W. 

Here's my reaction to it:  W AND XYZ@)!!***!@#)$(.

What was I thinking, anyway? 

Q:  How could a movie about a man I detest possibly be entertaining? 

A:  It probably can't.

See, there are no insights here into the spoiled, rich, blue-blooded, former alcoholic Geo (as his wife calls him), except that he has spent his life in a futile effort to please his much smarter, much more ethical, much more morally upright father.  Bush Senior, as played by pre-Boomer James Cromwell, (born in 1940) seems like a saint compared to his lightweight spawn.  Not-quite-Boomer Josh Brolin (born in 1968) plays W., a bit young and a lot more handsome than the real McCoy.  Then, there's not-close-to-Boomer Elizabeth Banks (born in 1974) who plays long-suffering wife to W., Laura.  She's clearly more intelligent and wiser than her hubby, but we never find out what she sees in him, why she loves him, or how she tolerates his political views.  It's a mystery onscreen, as it is in real life.  I don't want the real and true answer--if there even is one--but I'd like a fictional, Hollywood one, if only to sate my curiousity.  This movie, though, doesn't provide that.

The movie doesn't provide much, actually, though it does pin the blame for the political and economic and moral disasters of the past eight years directly on George W. Bush, and all of his enabling, vile, evil cronies:  especially Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rove and the simpering and obsequious Condoleezza.

The only consolation is that this will all be history in another few months.  Or, as W. told the Washington Press corps:  "In history, we'll be dead."