OF A GOLDEN AGE

A.O. Scott’s movie reviews for the Times are entertaining even when I couldn’t care less about the movie:

Remember “His Girl Friday”? “Bringing Up Baby”? “Holiday”? (If not, it’s never too late.) “The Bounty Hunter,” with its whirligig plot and incessant squabbling, shows some genetic connection to those sparklingly silly battles of the sexes. But it is also the latest evidence that, when it comes to romantic combat, we live in a more coddled, a less insouciant and also a more thoughtlessly brutal age than our ancestors did.

I have mixed, uncemented feelings about discrimination against obese people, having been technically obese (BMI-wise) for significant stretches of time and now only on the furthest reaches of the “overweight” range. There is an interesting piece in the New York Times about the social acceptability of fat discrimination, which some view as one of the last bastions of public prejudice. I was most moved by an assertion that the diseases and conditions we associate with obesity are exacerbated, or even caused by, chronic stress:

“Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.”

Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity. In studies, Dr. Muennig has found that women who say they feel they are too heavy suffer more mental and physical illness than women who say they feel fine about their size — no matter what they weigh.

I’ve never felt stressed by my size, even when I was at my heaviest. Yes, looking at pictures of myself or realizing clothes no longer fit was embarrassing in a private way, but more than that, it became an inconvenience and made me feel unhealthy.

My mom and I love Anna Quindlen and have for years, along with Anne Lamott and a tiny canon of other women writers. Quindlen’s life story is fascinating: She is a phenom from way, way back who has matured into a humane, sophisticated commentator on her life at the tail end of the Baby Boom. She wrote One True Thing, which was Cannonball #5.

I found Object Lessons at a recent charity booksale and snatched it up. It is Quindlen’s first novel and bears some resemblance to her real life. Maggie Scanlan is twelve, making up for her flat, skinny preteen frame with fully teenaged inner turmoil; she is the granddaughter of a proud Irish paterfamilias whose son went emotionally prodigal by marrying an Italian girl. The older girls among her family and friends represent alternate paths Maggie’s life could take, with Maggie’s own mother showing her the option she finds least palatable at the novel’s beginning. As Maggie remains quiet on the sidelines, she realizes her life as a silent observer will limit her life as a potent and gifted doer.

This book is packed with great female characters, but it also contains a great deal of strong, realistic maleness in various forms: Maggie’s grandfathers couldn’t be more different, but each is fascinating; her father is meek, passive, pulled along by his father until his Italian wife acts as ace in the hole. The story’s setting is also an active character: 1960s Bronx and Westchester County, where emerging housing developments threaten the Scanlans’ combination of city wealth and bucolic homesteading.

In the meantime, the girls and women in her life fall by the wayside completely or come into focus, shifting Maggie’s center of balance until she must shut her eyes and reboot. I felt that Maggie was a bit precocious, but her trajectory here felt very earnest. She and her mother are contrasted against one another as they inwardly admit and take ownership of their more small, shameful impulses, and they alone are able to see one another’s feelings or transgressions. When they choose to protect one another, it’s clear they’ll forge ahead together with bittersweet, loving honesty and knowledge.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Kinsey Millhone, a heroine I’ve read more than fifteen books about, may seem a strange follow-up to the classic Emma, but I chose her carefully for this. P is for Peril is one of the stronger Kinsey mysteries, involving a multilayered story and strong peripheral characters. More importantly, Kinsey is a self-sufficient modern woman who’s sworn off marriage and spends her days making assumptions about other people: She is the progeny of Emma’s smart on paper, stupid in feelings example.

A wealthy first wife comes to Kinsey to find her missing ex-husband, who at some point in the last few years left her for a stripper. He is a doctor caught in a breaking Medicare-fraud scandal who went missing nine weeks prior, just as the you-know-what hit the you-know-what. What at first looks simple turns out to be a total mess, with an embarrassment of riches as far as potential suspects go.

At the same time, Kinsey finds a too-good deal on some new office space with a pair of handsome brothers, one of whom is all up in her business with a Texas accent and a fixy carpenter thing Kinsey really likes. She also helps her apartment’s landlord Henry, a handsome and much-older gent she always kinda fancies, with a messy truckload of medical bills from a mutual friend’s elderly sister.

It gets very complex, the reader’s assumptions are established and then challenged, and Kinsey eats more crow than ever. She differs from Emma in that she is likable all along, and that her happy endings are not about happy matches for marriage. This one also had an abrupt, charming ending without any denouement and was paced to allow all the multiple intertwined stories to finish naturally. I was impressed with Grafton’s weaving skills, on top of her regular mystery-telling skills.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

WHOA WHOA WHOA. Look. I don’t mind that someone kept it a secret from me for the last decade that Jane Austen is amazing; I don’t even mind that my eighth-grade literature teacher — one of the worst teachers I’ve ever had — instead made us read Charles Dickens at age 13 though his prose is thick and overly wordy and Austen’s is straight, clean, utterly readable. All I can say is that I’m glad I read The Jane Austen Book Club and was told that I needed to read Austen in short order.

Let’s get back to the book. Emma is a timeless tale of a meddling young woman, the same as many I’ve known in my life but several-times-over more wealthy and with much more time for mischief. She goes through the story making misguided attempts to bring her friends and acquaintances together, romantically, and fails over and over. She is also comically haughty about the small rural community in which she and her father live, and on which she imposes a strict social hierarchy.

The wonderful part of all this, besides that it reminded me of the sweet meddling of high-school and college friends and their matchmaking, is the way Austen voices each character in the story. Emma is so righteous and passive-aggressive that she fringes on unlikable, if she weren’t counterweighted by the utterly sane Mr Knightley — they would make a good comedy team, he the straight man, she the flibbertigibbet. Emma’s father is paranoid and of delicate health, which comes out in his frequent laments over the women in his life who have married away: he refers to them all as “poor so-and-so,” as if they’ve come down with a life-threatening illness.

And in this small town, Emma and her father are the superstars. When Emma makes an awful remark to an old family friend, Knightley points out to her that others will follow as she leads, even if she intended the comment in good humor. I loved the contrast between outward Emma, so seriously denying every compliment and dodging people’s praise, and private Emma, thinking herself their better and absorbing every good word as if it were her last.

I loved this book, and read it as quickly as one can read a 450-page book from the early 19th century. The language wasn’t off-putting at all and Austen’s faux-haughty tone added great depth to the story and character development. In fact, I laughed out loud a lot of times at the tiny society Emma cultivates and culls down to a few, only to find that her ideas of appropriate matches are a complete disaster. Not even the brightest, most cerebral girl in town can choose for others what they must choose for themselves.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

I cannot praise Chris Jones’s deep, magnificent profile of Roger Ebert (in the new Esquire) enough. It moved me in every familiar way and some I never expected. Ebert’s passion for his life’s work shows in every detail:

Ebert scribbles constantly, his pen digging into page after page, and then he tears the pages out of his notebook and drops them to the floor around him. Maybe twenty or thirty times, the sound of paper being torn from a spiral rises from the aisle seat in the last row.

Jones also cleanses the palate of the notion that Ebert has gone soft in his reviews — Yes, he assigns higher ratings to more movies, but Ebert has explained that he judges movies based on what they’re aiming for, not where they fall in an objective continuum of all moviekind. Jones also makes it clear that Ebert’s changing life of surgeries, illness, and steely resolve has effected if not his taste then his attitude. As in all cases, I support people’s publicly changing opinions as their circumstances change, and I appreciate without bounds anyone who is willing to admit a change of heart.

I thought the Jones piece was the end of it, and then Ebert wrote an equally magnificent response. He is more gracious than can really be believed and it is a suitable end to the story Jones began.

Jerry Spinelli still captures neurotic youth in bloom better than almost any writer, and has done so for many years, but I’ve found that many of his books lack a solidity and complete package. Like Eggs (reviewed here / here), Smiles to Go features a solid, finely voiced main character surrounded by an odd plot and a lot of one-dimensional secondary characters. Whether the book is worth reading depends on whether you’ll relate to the main character.

Will Tuppence (stupid name alert — there are only six Tuppences listed in the phone book anywhere and they’re all in one city) is an earnest know-it-all with no emotional IQ. He’s a freshman in high school, with both a male and a female best friend and a family from whom he keeps his distance for some reason. He thinks everyone is out to annoy him or drive him crazy, and he has to think very carefully about almost all the everyday emotional experiences in the book.

The specifics of the story are not that important, and they’re symbolic and metaphorical in a way typical of YA fiction. The ending feels a little forced and abrupt but satisfies Will’s little journey.

I don’t know, I don’t know. This review sounds negative but I really did like the book, and Will reminded me of myself as a freshman — going through the motions of growing up and behaving responsibly, but lacking complexity in realms that were a little less concrete. Will is a very smart kid and the book begins with his fixation on the idea of proton death, which seems more important to him than any of the people I know. I hope Spinelli’s lesson here is not that the smart kids shouldn’t be so smart, but rather that our personalities and angles must exist in harmony.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Most people aren’t very familiar with Percy Shelley, a Romantic poet whose talents are counterweighted by his ego and biography. His most famous poem is Ozymandias, a compelling work for a variety of reasons: its intensely visual language and vivid diction; Shelley’s implications as to the staying power (or lack thereof) of political glory; the fast-life-early-death tale of Shelley himself, and the surpassing fame of his one-hit-wonder second wife (daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) whose legal name may as well be “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

For me, the most important takeaway from “Ozymandias” was always the more permanent nature of art and the influence of its creator on the legacy of its subject. When you trust your image in the hands of your court sculptor, in a vaguely phrenological sense, that person holds complete control over what the future will hold for you and how your character shows in the pose, expression, and demeanor of the sculpture. In this case, Shelley’s vision is completely fictional, but speaks to our feelings of impermanence in the temporal world. Like Yukio Mishima, Shelley studied the place where action and art merge.

Zastrozzi is one of Shelley’s earliest works, a short Gothic novel published when he was an 18-year-old student at the Eton School. In it, aristocratic Matilda (a blend of Annie Wilkes and Kathryn Merteuil) steals both the man she loves and the woman he loves, and does so with the help of her bosom friend Zastrozzi.

Matilda pulverizes her true love Verezzi by swearing that his lover Julia has died, and when Verezzi takes the news so badly he nearly dies, she has to step up her game in order to win him to her side. She sweeps him off to her estate in southernmore Italy so the warm weather may revive him; she acts a particular way in order to cultivate his dependency and gratitude, with intentions to somehow alchemize these feelings into love. Matilda pursues and manufactures the moment when action becomes love: she alters the circumstances of Verezzi’s life with her resources and her bare hands until he turns to her out of Stockholm syndrome.

The book strikes comical notes, and often. Young Shelley was aware that Gothic horror was a spit-upon and lauded genre, but embraced it anyway and did so with art and moxie. I’m guilty of some descriptor-slinging in my life as a lady of letters, and I recognize a fellow slinger:

She again went to Verezzi’s apartment, but as she approached, vague fears lest he should have penetrated her schemes confused her: but his mildly beaming eyes, as she gazed upon them, convinced her that the horrid expressions which he had before uttered were merely the effect of temporary delirium.

I count eight adjectives or adverbs in that one sentence, not to mention the thicket of helping verbs. Temporary delirium indeed!

The book is short and fast, and its characters say such ridiculous things I couldn’t help but love it. The ending takes a characteristic Gothic twist, and also, it is very fun to say “Zastrozzi” over and over. Zastrozzi. Zastrozzi. Leave the gun, take the Zastrozzi.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

On Friday my tutee and I went over the word “refuted.” I realized I got into too much detail and nuance when describing the words to him, which I can’t help, but refute was especially tricky.

“So you argue for something?” he said.
“No, not really. You argue against something someone else said, and back up your point,” I said. “So, yeah, you do kinda argue for something, but only because you’re proving something else wrong.”

We used it in a sentence, which I think was about the President and the Senate. Then real life presented me with a much better example. Tanya Gold wrote a regrettably stupid, bitter-sounding piece on why fashion is the worst, including — no, really — blaming high heels for a sixteen year old’s fatal fall between subway cars. In it, she makes a lot of straw-man arguments about thinness and unhappiness and blah blah blah.

One of the first commenters on the post swiftly refutes Gold’s claims. But the best answer came from Tavi of style rookie, who shoots the straw men down with one sentence:

What Tanya Gold and many others, including myself, hate is the everyone-has-to-look-the-same-and-also-sexy philosophy, which is NOT fashion.

Plenty of people have enormous style that isn’t tied to any era, any designer. To imbue your appearance with verve and personality has nothing to do with thinness OR sexiness unless you want it to. And to completely give up on your appearance, as it seems Gold has, isn’t making any statement against fashion. Most everyday people don’t participate in fashion, and even those who follow it don’t necessarily buy or wear any designer fashion at any point. She mentions feeling nauseous or something when she passes the Banana Republic, which is one of the classiest and most classic chains around and which has only occasional ties to trend.

I think Tanya Gold actually hates clothes that fit properly, and where that comes from I can’t say. Listen, friend Tanya. I am 5′11″ and 200 pounds, several standard deviations away from the average, and I diligently rifle through LOTS of wrong things before coming up with a right thing. And yes, on those days when I dress like a bum, I know that’s what I’m doing. In other words, here’s a quarter: Take your frumpadump “I hate fashion, t-shirts and broomstick skirts forever!” and call someone who cares.

The January 25 New Yorker fiction is Trailhead, an account of the life and times of an ant queen and the colony she establishes. Ants are kind of gross, and some of the details are kind of gross too, but it’s compelling stuff and doesn’t romanticize the ants:

First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her wings. To do that, she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body; it caused no pain. The Queen was a parachutist who slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid the ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle.

The same issue has a long profile of Neil Gaiman and this insane piece on cryonics. It’s definitely worth picking up.