LEISURELY THOUGHTS
from Howard
28 December 2004. We were sitting in the Indianapolis airport on Christmas morning, waiting for our flight back to Minneapolis. I was drinking a Starbucks latte and reading Jitterbug Perfume (now and then I need a Tom Robbins book) while our flight kept getting delayed. I was amazed how busy airports are on Christmas Day and how unprepared the airlines seem to be for that. We ended up leaving two-and-a-half hours late (for a one-hour flight) but were fortunate compared to all those people who had flights cancelled or missed connections or lost luggage. And we came back to an excellent Christmas with Jon, Tom and Joan.
Meanwhile, 2004 is zooming to a chilly finish. I hope you are enjoying warm holidays.
04 December 2004. It's so hard to walk into a Barnes and Noble or a Borders Book store and not buy anything, but I, with my anti-WalMart thinking, am trying to patronize independent bookstores when possible. We have a new independent shop in our neighborhood, Query Books, which has a pretty good variety of titles and is able to order whatever they don't happen to have on hand. Query also has the added attraction of having the Wilde Roast Cafe next door, a great place to have a cup of coffee (surrounded by Oscar Wilde decor) while you start reading the book you just bought.
I ordered three books at Query the other day, one of which was John Irving's new book for children, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (to make my John Irving collection complete, of course). You may remember that title if you have read A Widow For One Year -- It was the name of one of Ted Cole's children books. This John Irving version (which begins "Tom woke up, but Tim did not") is beautifully illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann and would make a good gift if you have any children ages 4 to 8 or any Irving fanatics on your list.
Another of the Ted Cole books was The Door in the Floor, which became the title of this year's film version of the first section of A Widow for One Year. Elke in Germany just saw that film version this week and has this to say about it: "I think it will be a flop here [in Germany]. It's not that I think the film isn't good. It's just that this movie is so utterly melancholic. You know, Irving knows a way to write wounded, suffering characters with a certain lightness that is showing them comical, or better, bizarre, sometimes. It's the usage of his vocabulary that helps a reader grasp the tristesse of his characters without getting the blues while reading. Whereas the film doesn't use this vocabulary, it uses pictures, and so it can't give you a faintest idea of the language in the novel..."
Hmmm... As I once said, "That may always be a problem of making film versions of John Irving novels."
21 November 2004. Temperatures were a little above freezing today, so Jerry and I were able to bike to the Vikings game, and it was okay, except that we had cold thumbs. The Metrodome is only about a mile from our house, and we ride our bicycles to the games as long as the weather permits (By next Sunday [vs. Jacksonville Jaguars], we might have snow on the ground). The Vikings have been nearly comatose lately -- maybe you've noticed -- but today, luckily for us, the Detroit Lions were even worse.
Our weekend visit to Toronto last week was a success. What a great city. Some say that Toronto is sort of a cross between Chicago and London, and maybe that is a good description. It might be a very cool place for us to have a getaway condo sometime (It's only an hour and a half flight from Minneapolis) -- maybe go partying with Margaret Atwood, have coffee with John Irving when he is town.
The week ahead: We are going to visit Jerry's parents in southern Illinois for Thanksgiving, then on Saturday we have a special visitor coming to see us -- our friend Grietje, from northern Germany, whom we met through her next-door neighbor, my good friend Elke (of "What Elke is reading" fame on this website), whom I met because of this website and the favorite author that we share. Grietje, come to think of it, is the person who some years ago introduced Elke to the works of John Irving.
11 November 2004. Some of our friends are nervous that Jerry and I are going to Toronto this weekend to house-hunt, in a sort of Sound of Music-like escape from bush and his storm troopers. There are no plans to house-hunt. This is a spur-of-the-moment trip, true, but we have been meaning to go to Toronto for a long time (I've never been there), and now is a good time to have fond thoughts of Canada. We will also hang out with our Toronto friend Danni and her boyfriend, but it will be mostly garage-saling (their Saturday morning compulsion), coffee-shop sipping, maybe a few Absolut cranberrys with splashes of orange juice.
Hmmm... I wonder if John Irving will be in town then. According to his bio, he lives in Vermont and in Toronto. I'll look him up in the phone book.
Taking along The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (last year's Pulitzer Prize winner), in my backpack. It's an okay book so far, one-fourth of the way into it, except that I keep confusing the characters. It's one of those books that needs a "cast of characters" listing in the front of the book, like the nineteenth-century Russian novels do. Known World is about the personal reality of U.S. slavery in the 1800s (Even some of the slaves own slaves!).
Incidentally, you might want to try the new movie, Sideways. I liked it. It's an off-beat and funny story of two friends spending a week together before one of them is getting married. You'll especially like it if you are into fine red wines (which I am not).
Back home on Monday.
06 November 2004. Philip Roth's new best-seller, The Plot Against America, which I just finished reading, is a sort of historical but highly personalized "what if" novel. The scenario: What if Charles Lindbergh, famous 1920s aviator-hero but 1930s Nazi sympathizer, had run as the Republican nominee for President against incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 (a year before the U.S. entered World War II in real history) and won? What happens is that the Lindbergh takes a "neutral" stance in the War and the U.S. slides into fascism: ultra-nationalism, suppression of dissent, programs to eliminate cultural diversity, fearful minorities becoming refugees to Canada... It is a very good book. It will make you think.
And its relevance to real-life 2004?..... Think about that, too.
Jerry and I are leaving next Friday for Toronto.
(But just for the weekend, Mr. Ashcroft).
Check out the "gallery" on this website (if you can get it to load): www.SorryEverybody.com. It will make you feel proud to be a citizen of the world.
17 October 2004. I recently finished reading Atonement, by Ian McEwan, a novel which was acclaimed by critics when it came out a couple years ago and which I have been meaning to read since then. I do have to say that, even thought it is a well-written book by an obviously talented man, I was quite disappointed in it. I try to read a variety of contemporary literary novels, and I am sometimes surprised at the number of structurally impressive but emotionally empty novels there are. Remember, I'm a John Irving reader. I need some emotion, some passion, perhaps some sentiment, to draw me into the characters. Atonement and books like it, to me, are detached storytelling.
I've just started reading the new Philip Roth novel, The Plot Against America, which I think I will enjoy quite a bit. I'll be taking it on our jaunt to Las Vegas this week (Las Vegas?, you're thinking?!). Jerry and I will be there along with my sister Joan (who is also reading The Plot Against America), and we will be meeting Jerry's sister and brother-in-law (who live in Indiana) there. Maybe you can picture Joan and me reading Philip Roth by the pool at the Mirage Hotel. Or maybe you can't.
Other things that are going on: The weather has turned chilly here in Minnesota -- it's leather jacket time. In football, the Vikings are doing well (despite my concerns about Daunte Culpepper), but my favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles, are doing great. In politics, only a couple weeks until the election, and I'm not sure how much more of bush i can take. What an embarrassment he is to all of us..
02 October 2004. Today is the 100th anniversary of Graham Greene's (1904-1991) birth. He is one of my favorite writers and also one of John Irving's favorite novelists (It was John Irving who got me started reading Graham Greene).
The Graham Greene books that I have read:
Novels: The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1950), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), A Burnt-out Case (1961), The Comedians (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973), and Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or the Bomb Party (1980).
Autobiographies: A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980).
My favorite, by far, is The Heart of the Matter. Second favorite: the autobiographies.
John Irving Graham Greene references that come to mind: Ruth Cole is reading a biography of Graham Greene throughout much of A Widow for One Year and names her son Graham. The priest in A Son of the Circus is attempting to explain The Heart of The Matter to his students.
Graham Greene links: Greeneland and Graham Greene site.
30 September 2004. It's been more than three weeks since we returned from Italy, and I have spent most of that time dealing with a non-vacation-related virus that knocked me on my butt. I'm very rarely sick, so it was hard to be stuck at home, not even feeling up to reading or writing and becoming disillusioned all over again with daytime TV. Wow, what a wasteland. But I'm almost back to normal now, and the doctors found nothing seriously wrong. It was just my turn to be sick.
Italy was great, by the way. I think we'll go back there again. Rome was fascinating -- so much to see and do there!... and Tuscany is beautiful. One of these days, I'll tell you more about our adventures.
25 August 2004. Today we are leaving for ten days in Italy. It is my first time to be in Italy. We will be in Rome for a couple of nights, and the rest of the time we will be staying with a group of friends and friends' friends at a villa in Tuscany where we either lie by the pool or take days trips to Pisa or Florence or wherever. I'm not much of a group vacation kind of a guy but am hoping for a restful and exotic vacation.
Airplane reading: finishing up The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene (in my quest to read all of the post-World War II Graham Greene books), then moving on to Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.
Arrivederci for now!
21 August 2004. So how are you enjoying the Athens Olympics? I must say, I have watched much more of this Olympics than I did the last few. I think that Athens has done well as host. My favorite event: gymnastics.
Last night we had dinner with Bette Midler. Okay, okay, there were maybe another 150 people there too, all of us there to support America Coming Together, a get-out-the progressive-vote political organization. But we did get to see Bette perform and to chat with her a little bit about politics. We even got a couple of hugs from her (Jerry has the lipstick on his shirt to prove it!).
We are already involved in the fall elections -- meetings, planning, fundraisers, "Kerry-Edwards" bumper stickers on my little red Volkswagen. It's going to be a nasty, awful campaign -- I wish I could ignore it. But I can't imagine how politically repressive the U.S. could become under four more years of bush. Involvement, for me, is not optional.
Meanwhile, summer is slipping away from us. We have another trip coming up this week, ten days in Italy, which should be wonderful, but then we get home and it's already September.
I haven't finished reading many books this summer, but I did finish the 817-pager Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Great book! Thanks to Oprah.
22 July 2004. Last month, i re-read one of my favorite John Irving novels, A Widow For One Year, in anticipation of the release of the partial film adaptation, The Door in the Floor, and I do have to say that I found Widow to be even better than I remembered it. It may be John Irving's masterpiece. But I needed to read the whole book to come to that conclusion. I love the way the last chapter, almost forty years later, ties to the first chapter. I love Ruth Cole as a grown woman. I love the scenes in Amsterdam and New York and Vermont. Some Irving readers prefer the first one-third of A Widow For One Year, which takes place in 1958; others, like myself, are more taken in by the last two-thirds of the book, which takes place in the 1990s.
The Door in the Floor covers just the first third of the book, and, instead of being set in 1958, is set in the 2000s (Thus, no sequel is possible, of course). The problem with this from my standpoint is that there is no way to make this anything other than an extremely sad story, which is what the 1958 story is.
I went to see The Door in the Floor last Friday night. The theater was quite full, and I could tell there were plenty of other John Irving readers in the audience (again I wondered, What do we have in common?) because there were chuckles now and then that wouldn't have come from people who hadn't read the book -- the Irving inside jokes. For what it is, I think it is a very good movie. The acting is very good, the characters are well-casted (with the possible exception of the Eddie O'Hare actor, who didn't fit my mental vision of Eddie), the screenplay is mostly faithful to the book. i don't know if anybody who hasn't read the book would get it, other than on a surface level -- it's appeal may be limited. I'm also aware that my enjoyment of the film was directly enhanced by my recent re-reading of the book: I would have forgotten too many details since first reading it in 1998.
I'm anxious to hear what other John Irving enthusiasts have to say about The Door in the Floor. I may go see it again before it leaves town. It may be the best film adaptation of a John Irving novel yet. I don't know. It just left me wanting more. Let me know if you'd like to go see it with me. We'll discuss it over coffee afterwards.
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