A lot of my stories involve older men or women reaching a breaking point because their lives are so banal and predictable. Is this autobiographical? Yes and no.
I am keenly aware that life can change in an instant--that in essence, life is never predictable. Moments of crisis can arise at any time, in any setting; and that is also a recurring theme in the stories. Sometimes a memory, juxtaposed against some specific thing that just happened, creates a life-changing emotion; something wells up and we decide, "No, things will no longer be this way," and there it is--life has changed, dramatically.
One of the things I wanted to say in these stories: moments of crisis and change occur throughout our lives, not just in our early adulthood, but right on into old age. Most of my stories involve people in their fifties or beyond.
If many of the stories are about suburbanites stuck in a dull routine, there are also stories which celebrate suburbia, routines, the everyday.
But it's true that on balance, most of the stories are about shaking up routines...and yes, that probably means something.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Intermezzo Part 2
My son has a cold, so he stayed home from school today. Didn't get much writing/editing done but did manage to run very well (my husband works from home four days a week and was watching my son). This probably won't be a long post; the cat woke me up again at 5 a.m...it's been a long day.
Re: "Immortal Beloved," it's a maddening film, in a way...yes, Gary Oldman does a magnificent job. Beethoven was a crank and wildly self-centered, and emotionally damaged from childhood; he constantly sought love, and rejected it, and in the end, he only lived through his music. This all comes out in Oldman's performance, so it is, in a way, a perfect bit of acting.
And the film itself is so close to being a masterpiece that it is heartbreaking. There are moments of bathos...not involving Oldman, involving some of the supporting actors. And in general, the tone of the film is always just a bit overwrought. Yes, Beethoven was a wildly emotional person. But we do not get enough of the working Beethoven. He wrote music, much of the time. He strolled the streets of Vienna and the surrounding countryside. He went to dinner parties, where he sometimes, but not always, behaved atrociously. But he was not a buffoon, and not as forlorn as this movie portrays.
So I guess it is, ultimately, the constant focus on Beethoven's sturm und drag that I object to, not the controversial idea the movie presents about which woman was the object of his greatest passion. If the film had been able to pull back a little--but we are constantly immersed in Beethoven's love life, and his most dramatic and tragic moments...it gets to be a bit much. And, ultimately, detracts from our understanding of the man and his music.
I should add, however: a few scenes from the movie are so remarkable, are so good at capturing Beethoven the raging genius, that I can almost forgive everything that goes off-track in the film...almost.
As I said, this film aims very high, and doesn't hit its mark; "Intermezzo" aimed low and easily succeeded. But I've been humming the "Ode to Joy" theme all day, and any film that puts Beethoven's miraculous Symphony Number 9 in my head can't be all bad.
Re: "Immortal Beloved," it's a maddening film, in a way...yes, Gary Oldman does a magnificent job. Beethoven was a crank and wildly self-centered, and emotionally damaged from childhood; he constantly sought love, and rejected it, and in the end, he only lived through his music. This all comes out in Oldman's performance, so it is, in a way, a perfect bit of acting.
And the film itself is so close to being a masterpiece that it is heartbreaking. There are moments of bathos...not involving Oldman, involving some of the supporting actors. And in general, the tone of the film is always just a bit overwrought. Yes, Beethoven was a wildly emotional person. But we do not get enough of the working Beethoven. He wrote music, much of the time. He strolled the streets of Vienna and the surrounding countryside. He went to dinner parties, where he sometimes, but not always, behaved atrociously. But he was not a buffoon, and not as forlorn as this movie portrays.
So I guess it is, ultimately, the constant focus on Beethoven's sturm und drag that I object to, not the controversial idea the movie presents about which woman was the object of his greatest passion. If the film had been able to pull back a little--but we are constantly immersed in Beethoven's love life, and his most dramatic and tragic moments...it gets to be a bit much. And, ultimately, detracts from our understanding of the man and his music.
I should add, however: a few scenes from the movie are so remarkable, are so good at capturing Beethoven the raging genius, that I can almost forgive everything that goes off-track in the film...almost.
As I said, this film aims very high, and doesn't hit its mark; "Intermezzo" aimed low and easily succeeded. But I've been humming the "Ode to Joy" theme all day, and any film that puts Beethoven's miraculous Symphony Number 9 in my head can't be all bad.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Intermezzo
Am watching, over the course of two nights (because I don't have time to watch a whole film in one sitting these days) the movie "Immortal Beloved." I saw it when it first came out, and loved it. Now--I'm not sure what I think...
Who was Beethoven? No one really knows, not even with all these letters and biographical tidbits...the "Immortal Beloved" letter was a huge piece of the puzzle--but the fact is that we do not know to whom the letter was addressed...
Beethoven has been such a huge part of my life, going back to when I was six or so (the same age my son is now) and listened obsessively to a recording of several of his pieces, called (absurdly) "Best of Beethoven." It included the last movement of the 9th Symphony, the last movement of the Emperor Concerto, and the "Wellington March." I also read a children's biography of the composer.
If I compare this movie with another, more lighthearted film, "Intermezzo," I feel that in some ways, "Intermezzo" provides a more satisfying peek into a composer's life--in "Intermezzo"'s case, Chopin's and Liszt's. Hugh Grant never received enough credit for his portrayal of Chopin in "Intermezzo." I don't think he ever really attempts to subsume himself in the real, historical Chopin; but in one scene, when his Chopin is telling George Sand that he might be too fragile for her--and Mr. Grant does his usual charming-awkward act, but with so much feeling and introversion--in that one scene I felt that he captured something about Chopin that was so important, it gave me a new insight into the composer's music.
There's another priceless scene; Chopin brings Liszt his new, as-yet-unpublished Etudes, and as Liszt begins to play Opus 25 Number 1 by sight (flawlessly of course), and Chopin and Liszt are attempting to talk about it, Liszt's wife, who had been trying to get her husband's attention, suddenly screams at him, and the ecstatic rippling notes come to a halt. The idea of Liszt's first performance of an immortal Chopin piece being interrupted in this way is just hysterical; it's one of my favorite scenes in the movies, period. And I think that one scene captures something important about those two composers--about their ability to shut out the chaos of their daily lives when they composed their masterpieces.
Because "Intermezzo" aimed lower, it was, in a way, more satisfying than "Immortal Beloved." Good movies about composers are extremely rare, and both of these films are good movies about composers--but "Immortal Beloved" strives to be great, and doesn't quite make it.
Who was Beethoven? No one really knows, not even with all these letters and biographical tidbits...the "Immortal Beloved" letter was a huge piece of the puzzle--but the fact is that we do not know to whom the letter was addressed...
Beethoven has been such a huge part of my life, going back to when I was six or so (the same age my son is now) and listened obsessively to a recording of several of his pieces, called (absurdly) "Best of Beethoven." It included the last movement of the 9th Symphony, the last movement of the Emperor Concerto, and the "Wellington March." I also read a children's biography of the composer.
If I compare this movie with another, more lighthearted film, "Intermezzo," I feel that in some ways, "Intermezzo" provides a more satisfying peek into a composer's life--in "Intermezzo"'s case, Chopin's and Liszt's. Hugh Grant never received enough credit for his portrayal of Chopin in "Intermezzo." I don't think he ever really attempts to subsume himself in the real, historical Chopin; but in one scene, when his Chopin is telling George Sand that he might be too fragile for her--and Mr. Grant does his usual charming-awkward act, but with so much feeling and introversion--in that one scene I felt that he captured something about Chopin that was so important, it gave me a new insight into the composer's music.
There's another priceless scene; Chopin brings Liszt his new, as-yet-unpublished Etudes, and as Liszt begins to play Opus 25 Number 1 by sight (flawlessly of course), and Chopin and Liszt are attempting to talk about it, Liszt's wife, who had been trying to get her husband's attention, suddenly screams at him, and the ecstatic rippling notes come to a halt. The idea of Liszt's first performance of an immortal Chopin piece being interrupted in this way is just hysterical; it's one of my favorite scenes in the movies, period. And I think that one scene captures something important about those two composers--about their ability to shut out the chaos of their daily lives when they composed their masterpieces.
Because "Intermezzo" aimed lower, it was, in a way, more satisfying than "Immortal Beloved." Good movies about composers are extremely rare, and both of these films are good movies about composers--but "Immortal Beloved" strives to be great, and doesn't quite make it.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Bay Area Natives
I am native to the Bay Area, but I am not a true native. I do not belong to one of the tribes that have lived in this region for thousands of years.
Today we went to a gathering of the Ohlone peoples at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont. "Ohlone" is a general term for many different peoples, who spoke different languages, but who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area or just beyond it--Watsonville, Santa Cruz, Monterey, the Central Valley.
What surprised me the most about today's event--this sounds ignorant, but I'll bet a lot of Bay Area residents are equally stupid about this--is the sheer fact of the living people. I had no idea that so many Ohlone still exist. (Their numbers are in the thousands--three thousand? Maybe more.) And many of them are actively researching and promoting their cultural traditions, their language, their stories.
The three of us, my son, husband and I, attended this event. We first saw the remarkable permanent exhibit the park has on display at their visitor center, complete with a large tule boat and many artifacts like obsidian knives and spearheads; we hiked to the original site of an Ohlone village, where one can see tiny shellfish fragments on the ground--remnants of past meals the Ohlone ate--and enter replicas of a traditional wood hut and a sweat lodge. After walking a mile and a half to get to the village site--through freshwater marshes, surrounded by tule reeds, cattails, and shorebirds, with the hot sun beating down--it was wonderful to sit in the small wooden hut in that former village, and feel the sudden coolness, the wonderful stillness.
When we hiked back to the visitor's center and the gathering, we visited the tables where they were teaching people how to make fire, by using only a wooden stick and a block of wood with little holes carved through it, slots about as wide as the stick. You put a dry leaf beneath the hole, put the block of wood on the ground (someone else needs to hold it there), spin the stick very fast between the palms of your hand while pressing it down into the hole, and watch as smoke forms at the base (hopefully) and little embers gather on the dry leaf. You can use those embers to light pine needles or whatever you have on hand that will serve as starter material. We got to that stage at least--the smoke, the embers forming; we didn't have time to light pine needles and start an actual fire, but we are inspired to try this at home...it was a great experience for my computer-obsessed, indoor-oriented young boy.
Then we saw a dance troupe perform; it was led by Patrick Orozco, an Ohlone from the Chumash and Juaneno peoples who was born in 1939 in Watsonville, and who heard stories from his Ohlone grandmother and made costumes based on her description of the costumes she saw the men wearing at ritual dances more than a hundred years ago; he learned two songs from her, and was also able to obtain recordings of Ohlone songs from archives at the Smithsonian. He formed a dance troupe called "Amah-Ka-Tura," and he has been its leader for decades.
My son witnessed about four of the dances; he was mildly interested (a bit hot and tired by that time), but I was fascinated. I couldn't help thinking as I watched: the Ohlone peoples have existed for thousands of years, and they persist, in spite of the crazy, materialistic, techno-obsessed Bay Area in which they must now make their homes...I am deeply moved by the graceful manner in which these people are celebrating and preserving their cultural heritage.
Today we went to a gathering of the Ohlone peoples at Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont. "Ohlone" is a general term for many different peoples, who spoke different languages, but who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area or just beyond it--Watsonville, Santa Cruz, Monterey, the Central Valley.
What surprised me the most about today's event--this sounds ignorant, but I'll bet a lot of Bay Area residents are equally stupid about this--is the sheer fact of the living people. I had no idea that so many Ohlone still exist. (Their numbers are in the thousands--three thousand? Maybe more.) And many of them are actively researching and promoting their cultural traditions, their language, their stories.
The three of us, my son, husband and I, attended this event. We first saw the remarkable permanent exhibit the park has on display at their visitor center, complete with a large tule boat and many artifacts like obsidian knives and spearheads; we hiked to the original site of an Ohlone village, where one can see tiny shellfish fragments on the ground--remnants of past meals the Ohlone ate--and enter replicas of a traditional wood hut and a sweat lodge. After walking a mile and a half to get to the village site--through freshwater marshes, surrounded by tule reeds, cattails, and shorebirds, with the hot sun beating down--it was wonderful to sit in the small wooden hut in that former village, and feel the sudden coolness, the wonderful stillness.
When we hiked back to the visitor's center and the gathering, we visited the tables where they were teaching people how to make fire, by using only a wooden stick and a block of wood with little holes carved through it, slots about as wide as the stick. You put a dry leaf beneath the hole, put the block of wood on the ground (someone else needs to hold it there), spin the stick very fast between the palms of your hand while pressing it down into the hole, and watch as smoke forms at the base (hopefully) and little embers gather on the dry leaf. You can use those embers to light pine needles or whatever you have on hand that will serve as starter material. We got to that stage at least--the smoke, the embers forming; we didn't have time to light pine needles and start an actual fire, but we are inspired to try this at home...it was a great experience for my computer-obsessed, indoor-oriented young boy.
Then we saw a dance troupe perform; it was led by Patrick Orozco, an Ohlone from the Chumash and Juaneno peoples who was born in 1939 in Watsonville, and who heard stories from his Ohlone grandmother and made costumes based on her description of the costumes she saw the men wearing at ritual dances more than a hundred years ago; he learned two songs from her, and was also able to obtain recordings of Ohlone songs from archives at the Smithsonian. He formed a dance troupe called "Amah-Ka-Tura," and he has been its leader for decades.
My son witnessed about four of the dances; he was mildly interested (a bit hot and tired by that time), but I was fascinated. I couldn't help thinking as I watched: the Ohlone peoples have existed for thousands of years, and they persist, in spite of the crazy, materialistic, techno-obsessed Bay Area in which they must now make their homes...I am deeply moved by the graceful manner in which these people are celebrating and preserving their cultural heritage.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
Library Days
My son has discovered the joy of books--the joy of diving into strange new worlds...it's not that he didn't have this experience before now; but more and more often these days, he's sitting down and immersing himself in a book by himself for several minutes. (He can spend forty-five minutes staring into his iPad as he plays a game, and the book-reading only lasts about seven minutes, max; but he's on the right track now, finally.)
His focus right now is limited--dinosaurs, monsters, ghosts and spooky creatures, knights and dragons, sea creatures, cats, dogs and farm animals...but whenever we go to the library, I grab at least a few books on other subjects, anything about which he has expressed an interest. Today my add-on books were about the Ohlone Indians, making paper airplanes, germs, and a book about knights in the Middle Ages. He picked out ten books on his own (another new development--just a few months ago I was selecting most of the books) so we have quite a nice stack of new reading material.
I feel both exhilarated and claustrophobic when I'm in a library...like the world is both opening up and closing in. After about thirty minutes I sometimes feel a desperate desire to leave. This occurred today...why? I don't really know...I love the world of words, but I love to escape from it as well.
His focus right now is limited--dinosaurs, monsters, ghosts and spooky creatures, knights and dragons, sea creatures, cats, dogs and farm animals...but whenever we go to the library, I grab at least a few books on other subjects, anything about which he has expressed an interest. Today my add-on books were about the Ohlone Indians, making paper airplanes, germs, and a book about knights in the Middle Ages. He picked out ten books on his own (another new development--just a few months ago I was selecting most of the books) so we have quite a nice stack of new reading material.
I feel both exhilarated and claustrophobic when I'm in a library...like the world is both opening up and closing in. After about thirty minutes I sometimes feel a desperate desire to leave. This occurred today...why? I don't really know...I love the world of words, but I love to escape from it as well.
Friday, October 2, 2015
Lucia Berlin
I am glad to see that Lucia Berlin is finally receiving a fair amount of national recognition...I have a feeling that there are at least 500 writers from the last thirty or forty years, writers recently deceased, who never received acclaim or even a polite nod from the literary establishment, because of a modest output or because their work never filled any sort of "glamorous" niche.
Lucia Berlin wrote stories about nurses, housecleaners, alcoholics. Her stories have both clarity and passion. "I carried him down the hallway like King Kong"--one unforgettable line from a story about a nurse caring for a very small man, a jockey. Berlin's narrator describes how beautiful the man was, and you can feel the strangeness of the experience for the nurse, as well as her fascination. Her stories are also funny, as that sentence indicates.
A collection of her stories was just released, ten years after her death...highly recommended for anyone looking for finely crafted stories about ordinary people and their extraordinary insights.
Lucia Berlin wrote stories about nurses, housecleaners, alcoholics. Her stories have both clarity and passion. "I carried him down the hallway like King Kong"--one unforgettable line from a story about a nurse caring for a very small man, a jockey. Berlin's narrator describes how beautiful the man was, and you can feel the strangeness of the experience for the nurse, as well as her fascination. Her stories are also funny, as that sentence indicates.
A collection of her stories was just released, ten years after her death...highly recommended for anyone looking for finely crafted stories about ordinary people and their extraordinary insights.
Thursday, October 1, 2015
All Over the Place
A full day. Read a book in my son's class, one that teaches about kindness, as part of a local program in which parent volunteers read books about kindness and prevention of bullying to their classes; then four parents, myself included, acted out short skits about kindness, choosing somewhat ambiguous situations for the children to think about (for instance, helping someone with a math problem, but saying, "That's so easy!" before any help is offered). It was great to be in his class, getting to know these six-year-olds, still babies in some ways, very mature in others...some of them wild and outspoken, others completely withdrawn. All of them, just about, wide open and hungry to learn. First grade seems like a wonderful grade to teach.
An hour after that, volunteered in an indoor play space that is open at my son's school at recess; sixty or more kids doing origami, chess, building with magnet-blocks, reading books, etc. It's that kind of school, where a large number of kids are doing origami and playing chess on a regular basis. (My son has discovered neither of those activities.)
This evening, called one of my aunts in Japan, after many months of hesitating, wondering if she was well enough to take a phone call. She was, but after a few minutes of conversation I think she was tired, or sad to hear my voice from so far away, or both; she mentioned also that she's only walking with great difficulty. I hung up the phone both exhilarated and deeply saddened.
In the middle of the day, completely rewrote a story that I'd almost thrown out, about a suicidal woman. The first version of the story was awful, just trash. This one seems, well, maybe not trash. Maybe this 54-year-old woman makes sense as a character; maybe I've made it so the reader will believe she is struggling with immense pain. Will have to read it again tomorrow to be sure.
A scattered day, too much going on...but most of it good.
An hour after that, volunteered in an indoor play space that is open at my son's school at recess; sixty or more kids doing origami, chess, building with magnet-blocks, reading books, etc. It's that kind of school, where a large number of kids are doing origami and playing chess on a regular basis. (My son has discovered neither of those activities.)
This evening, called one of my aunts in Japan, after many months of hesitating, wondering if she was well enough to take a phone call. She was, but after a few minutes of conversation I think she was tired, or sad to hear my voice from so far away, or both; she mentioned also that she's only walking with great difficulty. I hung up the phone both exhilarated and deeply saddened.
In the middle of the day, completely rewrote a story that I'd almost thrown out, about a suicidal woman. The first version of the story was awful, just trash. This one seems, well, maybe not trash. Maybe this 54-year-old woman makes sense as a character; maybe I've made it so the reader will believe she is struggling with immense pain. Will have to read it again tomorrow to be sure.
A scattered day, too much going on...but most of it good.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)