Weekend Update:
Icumen In
Memorial Day 2011
From one of the dankest springs that anyone can recall, we have been hurled into midsummer sultriness. It’s surprisingly incapacitating. I had big plans for today, and followed through on precisely none of them. Here’s how bad it was: I read feeds, faute de mieux. Feeds! On a holiday!
This morning, I persuaded Kathleen to get out of bed on the earlyish side, so that we could see the 10:30 showing of Midnight in Paris. There were still plenty of aisle seats when we walked in, especially in the back, where I prefer to sit (so that I don’t block people, but also so that I can dart out unobtrusively when the first gallon of Coke hits my bladder), but there was a good crowd for that time of day. Kathleen loved it, as I knew she would. I saw a lot of details that had flown by on Friday — for example, the party atmosphere in the old Peugeot that picks up Gil on his first trip back to the Twenties babbled and swayed in much the same way as the rooftop crowd of night-clubbers at the end of Radio Days. I don’t think that the similarity is at all referential; rather, Woody Allen has an Idea of “hobnobbing with the rich” that animates both scenes. And another thing: I’ve been increasingly aware of how the filmmaker sees himself as a magician, and how his movies become most amusing when you let him show you something unexpected, such as the presence of Edgar Degas. He is even better with old tricks, although I must complain that the great Gad-in-the-Galerie joke, which still makes me laugh just to think about, was over much too quickly.
Will was with us yesterday afternoon. He is shown above at the sprinkler basin in the playground at Carl Schurz Park. I was sure that he’d want to Get Wet, but, in the event, he didn’t, so he didn’t. Not long before, he had been asleep in his stroller, which I pushed to and fro with one hand while holding Bharati Mujkherjee’s Miss New India in the other. I finished Miss New India this morning, and I liked it very much; but I wish that I could put my finger on why the book struck me as “unsophisticated” and “old-fashioned.” You could say that it’s an exciting fantasy, in which a vibrant young woman is granted a very unusual chance to exchange the traditional life of her hometown in Bihar for a self-realizing career in Bangalore. Mukherjee handles the golden opportunity pretty realistically, but it is nonetheless dogged by the muffled creaking of machina. The material will come into its own as a feature film — a medium that will liberate the tale from the point-of-consciousness (not just -view) of a twenty-year-old girl from the mofussil who all too often “hasn’t the p’oggiest” idea of what other people are talking about. (To be fair, Angie/Anjahli gets her big break because she can actually say “foggiest.”)
On Saturday, we had brunch out on the balcony with my very first Internet friend, someone whom I met digitally over the Independence Day weekend in 1996. We had met once in person, already many years ago. This time, I was introduced to her husband as well, and the four of us had a lively conversation in a mercifull breeze. I had big plans for Saturday afternoon as well, but in the end I did nothing but read. Christianity, mostly. I’m loving that book! It was great fun, this evening, to see Dan Brown implicated as one of the “mediocre novelists” who imagine that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were man and wife. “Mediocre”: le most juste. What’s really exciting, of course, is reading church history, a field that used be owned by the Church! But no more. I’m deeply glad that I read Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ a few months ago. I’ve been recommending it to everyone, although I haven’t written much about it here. More anon!