Movietime

Having recently been to see Avatar (and both liked it and disliked it), I’m thinking I need to start keeping track of movies as well as books. The fact is, I love movies. The only time I use our brand new flat screen TV (which I have yet to figure out how to operate) is when I have time to watch something from our Netflix queue . Even so, my favorite way to enjoy a movie is in a theater. And oh, how I wish I lived back in the era of those opulent movie theaters – the ones with the brightly lit marquees and the ticket booths where you bought your tickets from a foxy-looking lady with a fancy hairdo, and milled around in lushly carpeted lobbies with chandeliers overhead, before being led to your seat by an usher with a flashlight in his gloved hand and a little pillbox hat on his head.

I remember going on a date to one of those grand old theaters in St. Louis, Missouri years and years ago. I think the movie was Whatever happened to Baby Jane and afterwards we had dessert at a restaurant called “Cyranos” - the most elegant and romantic place I’d ever been taken to on a date. I have no idea who I was with that night. Can’t remember anything at all about him. But I do remember the movie theater and the restaurant and the fact that I ordered the most outrageous thing on the menu, cherries jubilee, along with a strange, unheard of coffee drink called cappuccino.

But I digress. I was saying that I wished I lived back in the era of the elegant old movie theaters, instead of the huge ugly, aesthetically challenged multiplex warehouses that have replaced them. On second thought, I’m not so sure that I would want to sacrifice the level of sophistication and artistry apparent in so many of today’s movies, just for the fun of watching a huge velvet draped curtain rise above a much smaller silver screen. Film has been an art form for a long time, but these days the technical wizardry that is a large part of the movie making process has created a whole new kind of movie experience. For viewers, these kinds of movies – and Avatar is a good example - come across as a combination of art and....magic. Or at least that’s the way it seems to me.

There’s always been a magical element to what movies are capable of doing by drawing us into imaginary worlds even when those worlds are based on historical fact or contemporary experiences. But in the past we were probably a lot more aware of the part we had to play in going along with the magic. We knew that the half man half fish monster (Creature from the Black Lagoon) was just a big fake, as were the alien creatures and aircraft that showed up in so many early science fiction movies. Even when a trembling Jessica Lange was scooped off the street by a much more realistic version of King Kong than the 1933 version we could still spot the artifice if we tried. But we were willing to play along because movies could only go so far with the game of let’s pretend. We had to to do our part because otherwise I think we knew that the magic wouldn’t have worked. It’s different now. The magic is much stronger. It certainly was in Avatar.


British science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, famous for collaborating on the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” While that’s probably true of everything from ipods to flat screen television sets, I think it’s particularly applicable to the movie Avatar. Anyone who has seen the film will understand why. First of all there were the Na’vi, those 10 foot tall skinny blue people with long tails and huge eyes in their glittery faces who looked and behaved as if they were every bit as real as the humans in the story.

I’m told that some film critics have a hard time figuring out at which point acting ceases to be acting and turns into something that is being created by artists, digital technicians and computers.

Then there was Pandora - the world inhabited by the Na’vi, a breathtaking paradise of a place filled with beautiful plants and strange living things that glowed in the dark, giant trees, forests of clouds and all sorts of creatures, including enormous dragon like birds and heavily armored beasts capable of being tamed and used for transportation.

All this was quite magical and this was what I thought was so dazzling about the movie. Unfortunately, though, by the time I got to the end of the film I wasn’t so sure I could say I really liked it that much after all. Because while technically stunning, in the end that’s all there was to Avatar. It was technically stunning. There might have been a chance to deal with some compelling themes (industrial and material greed vs. protection of the environment; colonialism and exploitation vs. respect for indigenous cultures, plurality vs. dualism, balance and harmony, spiritual interconnectedness, and so forth) but it never happened. It was as if the filmmakers knew they needed a context for using the technology available to them and so they cobbled together a story so flimsy and predictable that I can’t imagine how anyone would want to take credit for coming up with it. But it didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that what was being passed off as a story had simply been thrown together in order to use the technology. As far as I’m concerned, in a truly great film it’s the other way around.

The other problem I had with Avatar is the same one I have with many other movies being made today. There were just too many scenes featuring huge, clunky robots that stomp around (or in some cases fly around) causing things to explode in spectacularly noisy bursts of fire.


I’ve noticed that scenes like these seem to have become the hallmark of many contemporary films. In fact it’s almost become a cliche that keeps showing up again and again in movies: big metal thing clanks into the picture...bursts of fire come shooting out...people run screaming into the distance...cars, planes, buildings exlode...noise and mayhem reigns. Why this has become so appealing is beyond me. (Perhaps it has something to do with why so many children have to be warned not to play with fire.) At any rate, these kinds of stock scenes kept appearing over and over again in Avatar and by the time the movie ended I left with one thumb firmly pointing down - despite all the magic that had impressed me.

A Year's Worth of Reading: 2009

The beginning of a new year of reading is also, for many people, a time to look back over what was read last year. And so, inspired by my friend Linda I think I’ll try to use some of her categories in addition to a few of my own to look back on what I read in 2009. But first, a few observations about reading (from Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz)

“I can vacillate lengthily, and foolishly, over whether to read at random or in some programmed way. I cling to the principle that if randomness determines the universe it might as well determine my reading too.”

“When every so often I have a spasm of needing to get organized, I make lists of books to read. In between reading the books on the list I am sidetracked by the books pressed on me by friends, or the shelved books demanding loudly, after much postponement, to be read right away. . .if only they knew the convoluted agonies of choice.”

Bookworm, Carl Spitzweg

Books read in 2009 : 36

Books started and abandoned: 6
Because I’ve finally caught on to the fact that life is just too short to mess around with books I can’t “get into”, I’m happy to report that I felt no remorse in tossing aside the following books before I’d finished (but not before I wasted too much of my valuable reading time trying to give them a chance.)

• Oh Play that Thing by Roddy Doyle(I don’t like the way he writes and the fact that it’s too damn hard figuring out who’s talking to whom since he doesn’t use quotation marks)

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (a long, ponderous and silly attempt at writing a page turner a la Dan King)

• That they may Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern (the descriptions of the Irish countryside and the peope who lived there were lovely but I kept falling asleep)

• Bard by Morgan Llewellyn (I should never have let myself be suckered in by the title and the fact that the author is Welsh)

• Land Circle by Linda Hasselstrom (just about made it through this one because some of her essays about women ranchers in Montana kept me reading.)

• Here there be Dragons by James Owen (I have to admit I picked this out solely because of the title. Perhaps I was expecting another Wizard of Earthsea but this definitely was not it. Although I loved the cover illustration )

Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio: 21/15

Male/Female authors ratio: 16/15

Books by the same author: 7

• Good evening Mrs Craven, and One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
• A Long, Long Way, and the Secret Scriptures by Sebastian Barry
• Deadman’s Ransom, Monk’s Hood, and St. Peter’s Fair by Ellis Peters

Re-Reads: 2

• One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
• Mysticism for Modern Times, Willigis Jaeger

Oldest: Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (published between 1939 and 1944)

Newest: The Secret Scriptures,Sebastian Barry (2008)

Best Title: Ruined by Reading by Lynn Sharon Schwartz

In Translation: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson

Set in Great Britain - 11

Favorite: A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry

I was captivated by this book and kept marveling at how such a grim subject (World War I) could be written about in such a beautiful way. Willie Dunne, a young Irish boy barely 18 years old goes off to fight in WWI - fighting for the English - while back at home in his native Dublin the fight for independence is causing him to confront political issues he had never thought about before...especially as the devoted son of a loving father who has been a policeman, loyal to king and country, all his life. The book gives us a poignant look into Willie's heart as he struggles with his feelings for his family, the girl he hopes to marry, his country and his fellow soldiers in his regiment, while all the while facing the horror and violence of trench warfare. All of this would be gripping enough, but in the hands of a writer like Sebastian Barry it becomes the kind of book that is hard to put down if for no other reason than the way its written. Here's an example:

"They stood there two feet apart in all that vale of tears, one man was asking another how he was, the other asking how the other was, the one not knowing truly what the world was, the other not knowing either. One nodded to the other now in an expression of understanding without understanding, of saying without breathing a word. And the other nodded back to the other, knowing nothing. Not this new world of terminality and astonishing dismay, of extremity of ruin and exaggeration of misery. And Father Buckley did not know anything but grief, and Willie Dunne on that black day likewise."

Shortest and Sweetest: Lights on a Ground of Darkness by Ted Kooser
Only 60 pages, but every bit of it was beautifully written and meant to be savored (and what else would you expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate of the U.S.?) It’s a gentle tribute to his family, written in the form of a reminiscence of a summer visit to his maternal grandparents who lived in Guttenberg, a sleepy little Iowa Mississippi River town:

"But for now it is summer, 1949, and I am a little boy. Our time with our grandparents is over. My father has come to drive us home. Before we leave, he fills his arms with tiger lilies picked beside the house, and we start out walking up the gravel road to the cemetery. It is now too late for irises. They have shriveled to rags. My sister and I walk on either side of him. I look back and see my grandmother is stooped in her garden, picking a few vegetables for us to take home. My uncle shuffles across the yard toward the filling station..."

Best Spiritual Reading: From Sand to Solid Ground by Michael Morewood,
and Radical Optimism by Beatrice Brueau.

And finally...

• Books from the library: 5
• Books from Paperbackswap: 16
• Books purchased from Alibris.com:10
• Books purchased in a bookstore: 3
• Books found on my bookshelves: 2

A very long post entitled BOO, HISS

Recently I popped into Barnes and Noble to take advantage of their after Christmas sale and there, just inside the front entrance, was a display that raised my hackles. (And I should probably add that my hackles do not easily get raised – especially in public.) A rather sheepish looking but terribly earnest young man was in the process of telling a handful of curious readers all about the new Barnes and Noble E-Reader.

I was outraged! First the big box book stores came to town and bullied my beloved Canterbury Bookshop into shutting its doors. (I still mourn its demise. It was a true haven for people who love to read – a warm and comfortable place filled with a great selection of books that were perfect for browsing. There were comfortable chairs tucked away in little nooks and crannies where we could spend as long as we liked flipping through the pages of whatever had caught our fancy. Best of all there was Trudy, the gentle wisp of a bookseller whose inspiration it was to create Canterbury Bookshop in the first place and who treated her customers as if she had opened the shop specifically for them.) But I digress. It's bd enough that Borders, and Barnes and Nobles have pretty much taken over the book selling business. But at least they were selling books. Now it looks like books could be headed for the same fate as independent booksellers – at least that’s what the people who have brought us e-books would have us believe.

But to get back to my reaction upon seeing the e-book display at Barnes and Noble....as I was saying, I was outraged! Which was why I huffed myself up and marched right over to the display and tossed out an angry BOO, HISS as a means of letting it be known that I for one am not going to take lightly this assault on what, in my opinion, is one of humankind's finest acheivements - the creation of the book.

I think my love of books probably began way back when I was small enough to nestle up next to my mother as she read to my brother and me. It was a gift she gave me and it reminds me of that rather schmaltzy little ditty by Strictland Gillilan that ends with the lines... "You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be – I had a mother who read to me.”


I can remember looking at those mysterious squiggly looking shapes on the page in front of her as she read and thinking that reading was a very magical thing, and someday I would be able to do it all by myself.

Mother tells me that the first time she took me to the children’s room of our local library (in the basement of one of those wonderful old Carnegie libraries that, sadly enough, was demolished in the 70’s and replaced with something much more up to date but greatly lacking in ambiance) I took one look at all the books and told her I planned to read every one of them.


It was just the beginning of a life long passion for books. And the older I get, the more that passion grows. At age 64 it’s a sobering thought to realize that even if I were to spend every waking hour of the rest of my life with my nose in a book I would probably not make it to the end of the list of books I hope to read in my lifetime. That’s because I keep adding titles to that list. As a result the bookshelves in our house (and there are many of them) keep getting crammed with more and more books.



Sometimes I fantasize about spending an entire week, or maybe a month if I really wanted to be decadent, reading in bed. I’d only have to emerge now and then, long enough to go to the bathroom and perhaps take a shower if absolutely necessary.

But to return to my original subject – my rant against E-books: Part of the problem I have with the whole concept of electronic books is that they simply aren’t books. They’re gadgets that allow a person to have instant access to words, which is fine, but books do more than merely present me with a bunch of words. I think the difference has to do with why we read in the first place. If we’re reading simply to acquire information, there’s no doubt that E-books will deliver. The technology makes it possible to search around on the internet for the information you’re seeking, click on a link and then download what you’ve found to your computer, IPOD, laptop, or (I presume) your E-reader. So, it’s fine for those who are looking for immediate access to information. But...that’s certainly not the only reason I read.

I read for the sheer and exhilarating pleasure that books can provide. Not only the pleasure that comes from reading words, but just as importantly for the sensory pleasure that goes along with taking a book off the shelf and experiencing what’s inside.

For me, reading is a sensory pleasure. Take the way books smell, for example. Admittedly this may seem a little odd, but one of the first things I do when I open a new book is take a good sniff or two. (Appropriately enough, for someone who has been accused of spending too much time with her nose in a book.) I don’t know what it is about certain books, but there’s something about the way they smell that is definitely one of my all time favorite fragrances. Maybe it’s because the first book that smelled that way was one my mother read to me. It was a big, thick story book and I used to put my face right down next to the pages so I could smell the magic that was there as mother read about fairy princesses and golden spinning wheels and enchanted castles. Every once in a while I find a book that exudes that very same magical fragrance and I’m reminded once again of how wonderful it is to wander into the realm of the make-believe. I have never sniffed an E-reader, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t do much for me.

Neither would the way it feels. Books on the other hand are wonderfully tactile. We have a small collection of books that were printed at the turn of the previous century by the Roycrofters , a community of artists and artisans that flourished in East Aurora, New York around the turn of the previous century and was instrumental in influencing the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.


Roycrofter books are works of art in and of themselves. Some of them feature suede or even leather bindings and covers. . .



. . . and all of them are beautifully printed on fine quality paper and embellished with hand-colored initials and illuminations by the artists who worked for the Press.



There’s just no way an E-book could ever capture what makes these books such a pleasure to pick up...and feel....and look at....and read.

I think that part of the pleasure of books is visual. Some books are lavishly illustrated and a sheer joy to look at not only because of the skill and artistry that went into creating the illustrations but also because of the way they are laid out on the page in order to correspond to the text. Here is an example from , The Illuminated Rumi, by Coleman Barks and Michael Greene.


It’s hard to imagine an e-book doing credit to these beautiful illustrations – or the way they have been presented as part of the text itself. So for someone who loves to read, not only because of the words found on the page, but also for the sensory pleasure of the book itself, an E-book just isn’t going to provide what I’m looking for. And as for what the earnest young man at Barnes and Noble pointed out about how portable these electronic gadgets are, I have to repeat what I said earlier: Boo, hiss. Unless for some inconceivable reason I might want to lug around a volume containing all the works of Shakespeare, or perhaps the Oxford dictionary in its entirety, most books I want to take with me can be carried along quite easily. Granted I have been known to pack entire boxes of books to take along when leaving for a vacation because I simply can’t imagine going anywhere without a generous supply of books. Nevertheless, I’d still rather do it that way than pack a single E-book. For all the reasons I’ve already mentioned.

For Christmas I received as I always do, several books I’d been hoping I’d get. One of them is Classics for Pleasure, by Michael Dirda, the book critic for the Washington Post and author of several other books about the joys of reading, including An Open Book, a memoir about how he came to be such a book lover. No sooner had I started the introduction to his latest book than I came across another good reason for why I can’t imagine living without good books to read. He says:

“More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions...Sappho’s heartache is that of anyone who has ever been hopelessly in love. Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel starkly reveals both the horror and exhilaration of war. The Book of Common Prayer reliably comforts us in times of sorrow, uplifts us in times of celebration....On those evenings when the world is too much with us, 221B Baker Street, home to Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, has long offered a warm fire and snug refuge. Come April or May, we will always awake some Saturday morning like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, to the wonder and beauty of spring.”

Now, some may argue that all of that is just as possible by down-loading any of those titles on to an E-reader as it is by taking them off a shelf somewhere. I’m not so sure. All it takes for me is to compare the following two versions of Jane Austen's beloved Pride and Prejudice to convince me which one I'd rather pick up and read....