Potpourri

How did a week go by without a post? Oh, yeah, it was Thanksgiving week here in the U.S.

What have I been doing? Well, for starters, we invited my parents up for the holiday. They live about 100 miles south of us--just 1.5 hours or so if the traffic is light. They are 86 and 88 and since our house is full of stairs, we all decided that a Courtyard Marriott would be sleeping quarters for them. Between picking them up Wednesday, cooking a wonderful dinner Wednesday night, shuttling them back and forth between our house and the Marriott for much needed naps while they were visiting, cooking a fabulous Thanksgiving feast on Thursday, teaching my mom how to make coffee in the hotel room, teaching my mom how to deal with those new-fangled plastic key cards, watching several episodes of Animal Planet, catching up on all the family doings, taking them back home on Friday, I'm just glad we have leftovers to last for awhile!

On the reading front, I have started and given up on Bronteby Glyn Hughes. It was better than The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte, but on the whole rather flat really little more than dramatizing well-worn tales from Bronte lore. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I found myself growing impatient and rolling my eyes, so I figured this book wasn't a good way to spend my precious reading time.

I've also been plowing my way through the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery series by Julia Spencer-Fleming. I reached book five, All Mortal Flesh yesterday and was shocked to find that the series had jumped the shark! ****SPOILERS**** skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to learn that Spencer-Fleming did a cardinal no-no in my opinion. She killed off Russ's wife, Linda. Maybe some day I will read the novel and find out why, but I was so ticked off that Spencer-Fleming betrayed my trust as a reader that I returned the book to the library and will Clare and Russ a rest for awhile. Maybe I was irked because book four, To Darkness and to Death, was so terrific--the whole novel took place in one day and it was really well-written and interesting in that the mystery wasn't figuring out which dastardly arch villain was orchestrating the mayhem but instead was a study in how ordinary people can find themselves going down very dark psychological alleys when pushed hard enough. I was thinking how marvelous Spencer-Fleming was developing as an author, and then she pulled that cheap trick in book five.

So, I started Paul Collins's The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. So far so good. Collins is an excellent writer--I've learned three new words and I've only read the first 50 pages--and the subject matter is compelling. Learning tons about the publishing industry in the early 1600s in London right now, and anticipating learning even more about Shakespeare, his colleagues, life in London, and how the First Folio conquered the world. BTW, I did finish A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and need to find time to do my last blog on it...Hamlet. This was definitely my favorite book of 2009.

I also just started Jenny Uglow's bio of George Eliot. I enjoyed her bio of Gaskell so much that I have decided to read about Eliot while reading her works.

I did read another Henry James story--The Romance of Certain Old Clothes--and was again disappointed in James and the story. Nothing particularly wonderful in the way it was written, and the subject matter has been done to death. Sisters who are jealous rivals, and one haunts the other. Grim, misogynistic, uninspired. I am going to have to read Daisy Miller so I can give James his due.

Finally, I did read the first installment of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I am on the email list for the installments, following the same publication schedule as the serialization of the novel 150 years ago. This is a reread for me, but I read the original so fast for plot years ago that I don't remember a lot of it.




On the adaptation front, I am on episode 11 of the first season of The House of Elliot. Evie and Bea are friends again, Jack is courting Bea, and Lydia is desperate to get back into London society. So much has happened in the first 10 episodes that it almost seems like several seasons worth of plot. I wonder whether this season was actually cancelled or if the producers simply ran out of steam after running so hard so fast. I'm still loving it, thinking about bobbing my hair, and dressing exclusively in 1920's fashions, including the hats! V. chic.

A Screw Loose

I finished Turn of the Screw last night and started reading some of the essays that follow the story. Seems that critics since publication have been in one of two camps--either it was a straight ghost story, or the governess is crazy.

I'm firmly with the governess-is-crazy crowd. This occurred to me midway through and became increasingly obvious that either she (nameless, just like the heroine of Rebecca!) was crazy or James was.

This was truly one of the least satisfying books I've had the pleasure of reading...yes, pleasure, because despite the obtuseness of James's style, there is a fluency and competency in his writing that still gives some pleasure. I generally don't have a problem with ambiguity but Turn of the Screw does try my patience. I ended up being frustrated with the lack of information the author shared with me. I can live with arguing about whether the governess really saw ghosts or was simply nuts, but I want to know how and why Quint and Jessel died, what Miles did that was so horrific at school that he was expelled (somehow I can't swallow that it was simply swearing), if he truly was expelled or if that was a figment of the governess's madness, and what Mrs. Grose really thought of the governess and where she and Flora fled to. Finally, of course, is the question as to whether Miles is really dead at the end, and if so, whether the governess killed him.

Frustration aside, one of the themes I was thinking about whilst reading this book is the 70's slogan "The Devil Made Me Do It!" If you take the story at face value and accept that the children were possessed by the ghosts of Quint and Jessel, then it's pretty clear that their "bad" behavior is exonerated because they are possessed. I put the word bad in quotes because the story doesn't show them doing much beyond excelling at their schoolwork and lessons, looking out windows, wandering about outside, using swear words (which they allegedly learned from Quint and Jessel) and being at first first confused and then alarmed at the behavior of their governess.

I wonder how true the Benjamin Britten operatic version is to the original story. Anyone seen it?

The Turn of the Phrase

For some reason, I have barely read any Henry James--Daisy Miller so long ago it really doesn't count and The Aspern Papers a year or so ago as a follow up to John Berendt's City of Falling Angels.

The RIP challenge that is make the blog rounds got me to thinking that a good ghost story would be a fun read, and since The Turn of the Screw has so many fans, is by a classic writer I haven't really read, I decided to give it a go. Plus, I had picked up this version of the story (The Turn of the Screw (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism)) at my used bookstore and it's been just collecting dust for awhile.

In a nutshell, James is not a walk in the park.

On the upside, I can understand Hemingway better after having attempted to read James. He makes me want to write short, direct sentences as well!

The story itself (i.e., Turn of the Screw) is really good, but I feel like I have to diagram each sentence to make sense of it. I have to reread sections, and the parentheticals are driving me crazy. I like his vocabulary, but the denseness of his style tends to undercut his ability to build tension. The story just loses momentum when the reader is forced to reread for meaning.

In a way, I'm looking forward to reading the essays that follow the text at least as much as the story itself.

All my ranting aside, the story really is good. I know the current governess gets out alive because the framed part of the story is that the narrator is reading her manuscript, which she wrote after leaving Bly. I've got my eye on Mrs. Grose--she knows more than she is letting on. Those kids are getting spookier by the minute. Maybe James really did know what he was doing...

Here's an image from the movie The Innocents, which is based on the book. I imagine I'll be watching it sometime this fall.