Entries in the Category "favorites"
Roman Fever and Other Stories
I just read Edith Wharton's Roman Fever and Other Stories, a post-semester pleasure for me.
Everything about Edith Wharton's work is stately, like an antique fainting couch in a museum, its frame hand-carved, its fabric delicately embroidered. But somehow, the stories are not stifling. Some are sly and humorous, like "Roman Fever" and "Xingu," which both make fools of people who think they know more than they do.
What I really love about Wharton, though—and The Age of Innocence, arguably her most famous work, is a great example of this, too—is the way she lays out her characters' conflicts quite transparently, all so readers can admire how inevitably people misunderstand and unwittingly abuse one another. You want to take her characters by the shoulders and translate for them.
I especially love how she dissects marriage, the roles that couples play for each other and how restrictive they can be. "Souls Belated" is an amazing story about how you build a new relationship out of an affair--if you flouted the convention of marriage once, do you just jump back into it? Do you invite the same people to your dinner parties and pretend things haven't changed? "The Other Two" is about a man trying to feel disaffected about doing business with his current wife's last husband. In a way it's all very old-fashioned, but it's also incredibly relatable.
Wharton also never fails to comment on the way people and habits evolve over time. In "Autres Temps..." ("Other Times...") a woman who left her husband twenty years ago, and regretted the social isolation that followed, overhears two young women talking. Through their conversation she discovers that in the ensuing decades, behavior has become so much freer that leaving one's husband for another man has become the thing to do:
All of their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them—her name was Mabel—as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement ring.
The only legitimate criticism I've ever heard of Edith Wharton is that her work is exclusively rich and white. I once read a Marxist critic who complained that "the worker" wasn't present in Wharton's work, that the servants toiled behind the scenes. This is really not to be denied. (Well, I think one of the ladies in The House of Mirth works in a hat shop, but, you know.) Still, I don't find that a valid reason to discount the work she did. She had a narrow lens, sure. But can't we admire the depth of focus?
The Dixie Chicks and Our First Amendment Rights
Isn't it weird how you can love something and forget about it for awhile, and then have it be immediately rekindled when you experience it again? It's been like three years since the Dixie Chicks put out a new album, and I hadn't listened to them in ages. Then, today, I clicked over to the AV Club and saw this: Dixie Chicks, Badass Motherf**ckers. Yes, that's really the title. It's a write-up from Nathan Rabin, one of their music guys, who's trying to educate himself in country, as he realizes that just because the Dixie Chicks are cute doesn't mean they're not awesome.
I read the thing, I watched all the embedded videos (haven't seen "Goodbye Earl" in awhile?), and then I was seized by the desire to rewatch Shut Up and Sing, a documentary about the band trying to come back from the unexpected controversy that was generated over an off-the-cuff remark during a concert in 2003.
Rabin seems to be positioning most of the vitriol that was directed at the Chicks as based on them being women—pretty, (mostly) blonde, popular chicks. They're supposed to be wholesome, they're not supposed to have opinions at all, and certainly not divisive ones. Watching the movie again (which, of course, I did), I think Rabin is really on to something.
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Eternal Sunshine and Remember?: The Same Concept Across a Few Generations
So last week I watched this strange film called Remember? from 1939. The synopsis reminded me of one of my all-time favorites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—in both films, former lovers utilize mind-erasing technology to forget each other—and I was curious how such a postmodern concept was going to be executed circa 1939. What I found was that Remember? is not exactly the mind-bendingly awesome experience that Eternal Sunshine is, though there were interesting similarities.
Basically, what happens is this. Lew Ayers meets Greer Garson on vacation, gets quickly engaged to her and brings her home to meet his best buddy Robert Taylor. Of course, Taylor and Garson fall in love instead. Ayers has apparently not seen his own movie, Holiday, in which almost the exact same thing happens when Cary Grant meets this woman on vacation, gets quickly engaged, and she brings him home to meet her sister, Katharine Hepburn, prompting Grant and Hepburn to fall in love (but, then, Ayers is the drunk brother in that movie, so that would account for him not remembering it). Anyway, Garson and Taylor fall in love and, with Ayers’ blessing, get married themselves. It doesn’t work out, and they’re soon divorced, but LUCKILY, Ayers and Taylor work for an advertising company that is developing a campaign for a forgetfulness serum. Ayers feeds the serum to his terribly depressed best friend—and Garson gets a hold of it somehow, too, I forget how—and, just like Joel and Clementine in Eternal Sunshine, the pair meet again and fall for each other again.
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