Winter Beauty

Winter has come to England, or at least my corner of it. We've had two days of snow so far and are expected a whole week of it. It's amazing for a California girl to see her whole world transformed like this, as if somebody had made a cast of every single contour of the streets and the trees and houses and replaced the real things with ice sculptures.

I have Christmas trees outside my window, snow monsters parked along the street, and a river of alternating snow and slush where the pavement should be. It's all a silver lining to these very dark and cold January days.

 

 

There's not too much more to say about it. Snow is quiet, and I think my favorite part about it is standing staring out at a landscape and resting my eyes from the usual hustle bustle of details and movement. Nothing moves fast, except the sudden bits of snow falling on my head from trees. Uneven landscapes are suddenly smooth and monochrome. 

Hope you got a sense of how pretty it is from these pictures - I haven't actually ventured further with my camera than my bedroom window, but maybe later in the week, if it keeps up, I'll go take some pictures in the park, which is so beautiful. In the meantime, I'm gonna make some banana pancakes.

Looking back

As the new year begins, I'm looking back, but not at 2012. More like 1745. I've been reading Waverly in preparation for one of my new courses this semester, which is focused on the historical novel. And even though the class hasn't even started yet, I'm already starting to pay a little more attention to my interest in historical fiction.

I was thinking yesterday how fun it's going to be to get back to historical fiction, which was a big part of my childhood reading. Then I realized that I won't really be getting back to it - I've been reading it all along. Some of my favorite books from the past year have been set in the past: The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell, Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan, and, of course, the historical novel that's gotten talked about so much since it and its sequel won the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. Over the past few years I've also loved The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey, and Atonement, again by Ian McEwan. Two of the top books on my to-read list are Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, and Perfume, by Patrick Süskind, both historical novels.

My list of favorite movies and TV shows is even more peppered with historical drama: The Hour, BBC's amazing recreation of its mid-century self, is one of my all-time favorite shows, and the best detective show I know of is Foyle's War, set during WWII. I also love the film versions of Atonement and of Une longue dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement), originally by Sebastien Japrisot, adapted by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Historical movies and TV shows have an obvious allure for me, because I love to see historical costumes reconstructed so stunningly and in such detail. One drawback of historical novels is that they usually don't devote many words to describing clothes. I suppose that modern readers wouldn't stand for it, however fascinating it might be to me. I actually stopped watching another period piece the other day (actually an adaptation of a classic, not a historical novel), The Paradise, partly because there weren't enough close-ups of the costumes. That might seem a ridiculous reason, but I think that part of the appeal of historical stories for everyone is a chance to glimpse the past close-up and ogle all its oddities, from old-fashioned customs to clothes that have no zippers.

For me, the costume-obsession is just one part of my interest in the atmospherics and textures of the past. I loved The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet for the way Mitchell works his narrative around the gritty details of life on Dejima, the Dutch portal to Japan in the 18th century. But there's a real thrill in not just physical, but also psychological detail. This is one of the best things about Wolf Hall, which plunges you into a first-person account of Tudor England from the unlikely, but captivating perspective of Thomas Cromwell.

The class of course, will not be just about what makes historical fictions fun and interesting, but also, I suspect, the ethics and mechanics of recreating history in stories. Not only that, we get to try our hand at historical fiction ourselves. I think some people dread taking classes on a genre or subject they love - I seem to hear a lot of people complain that high school English classes, and even college courses have ruined certain books for them. But when I find a good course on something I love, I look forward to enriching my appreciation of it, expanding my reading list within the genre, and meeting other people who are just as passionate about it as I am.

I'll report back about the progress of the course and what I've learned in a few weeks. In the meantime, are there any historical novels, films, or TV shows you love that I should check out? I love suggestions.

November Things

This post is both late and brief. It's finals week, what can I say?

Food:

I discovered an amazing snack the other day when I was craving something to carry me through a long study session - I'm not sure exactly what they're called, but they can mostly be summed up as crunchy seaweed peanut deliciousnesses. They're basically peanuts encased in a shell of seaweed-flavored crunch. Not only is the texture perfection and the taste wonderfully salty and savory, but they also come in a variety of patterns and colors, like marbles, depending on the type of seaweed, I suppose. I may need to buy myself a package for the plane flight home next week and then subtly suggest to the stewardesses that they hand these things out instead of bad cheesy-tomato snacks.

Entertainment:

What I miss most about living in a warmer climate is getting outside, whether to sunbathe or take a hike. It's just not that appealing when it's so cold and dark out. So I've had to force myself to at least go outside on my way to another indoor space by, for example, going into town to look at the shops and their holiday decorations or taking myself to the movies. I saw a couple of really good films over the last few weeks: Amour, The Sapphires, and Silver Linings Playbook. Didn't have time to review them all, but I do recommend them (although you should only go see Amour if you like artsy, difficult films and don't mind having a messy feeling of happy and sad as you walk out of the movie theater). There are a few other films I wanted to see in theaters, but this week has been more devoted to watching movies at home because I needed to buckle down to work. Still, thank goodness movie theaters are staying afloat and open, because they are such a good antidote to winter cabin fever.

Music:

The Civil Wars. Ever since The Hunger Games came out, I've been hankering for more music like the song Safe and Sound and failing to find any similar songs by Taylor Swift. Eventually, I copped to the fact that I should try searching the music of The Civil Wars, who are featured in the song. Perfect. If you like The Avett Brothers or any kind of chill folksy music, check out their YouTube channel. They're really good.

Review: The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

I have to give a presentation on this book on Thursday, so I did another marathon Day of Reading today (there've been a lot of those lately). Now I'm too tired to read any of the articles and reviews I'll need to do my presentation properly, but I thought it might help to write down some impressions of the book here while it's still fresh in my mind.

This is not a book I would have finished if it weren't for class, but I'm very glad I did. It consists of four sections, each labeled with a name. They tell the stories (put together by an unnamed narrator whose life parallels Sebald's so closely that I had to look it up to make sure it was really a novel) of four Jewish men who emigrate from Germany to England or America over the course of the 20th century. 

The first thing that threw me off was that the sections are not equally weighted. The first is really brief, a glimpse into a life with which the narrator briefly crossed paths. But each section is longer than the one that precedes it, and each story is more nuanced, with more voices adding their perspectives (voices that the narrator gleans from journals, conversations, and interviews). The stories also seem to circle closer and closer to the Holocaust, from the lives it touched to the lives it ended, but the scope of all the narratives together covers both world wars and much other German, English, and American history besides.

What I thought would be a book about the Holocaust turned out to be a book with truly universal insights into the experience of exile. It's about the reasons people leave home and the things it does to them, a topic quite close to me right now.

But this book was also very interesting structurally. The text is interspersed with black and white photographs, which are presented as samples drawn from family photo albums that the narrator came across as he researched various personal histories. This was another reason that I kept thinking the book must be non-fiction, or at least thinly disguised fact. The photos are not cited, so either they really are photos of the people Sebald is writing about, or they are photos of other people, who remained anonymous - a slightly unnerving prospect. I'm very curious to find out more about the sources of these photos in researching book more, but for now the faces scattered throughout the book are a mystery to me.

(This connects to a discussion I had in class yesterday about para-text and the cover design of classic literature - trends like the endless reprints of Jane Austen with painted portraits of anonymous Austenesque women who sometimes have nothing distinguishing in common with the characters in the book. With newer books, I always find myself a bit puzzled by the number of covers with photos of stock models on them, often enough young women with their heads cut out of the frame. I'm never sure whether I'm supposed to imagine the characters as they appear on the cover or not. But Sebald seems to be pushing the envelope by blatently juxtaposing photos and text and seeing what happens. I'm not sure yet exactly what happens, but it was a different reading experience and it challenged my expectation of what fiction should look like.)

The other interesting structural choice is the way in which stories overlap and become confused as you progress through the four sections. This reminded me a lot of what Faulkner does with storytelling and the recollection of the past in Absalom, Absalom!, except that all his narrators circled around one particular family history, whereas Sebald's narrators are mostly all telling their own stories. It's just that those stories start to seem more and more like one story, with landscapes, memories, dreams, and names crossing and recrossing over time, over land, and over a constellation of individual consciousnesses.

I was warned before starting the book that Sebald can be a little dry, and it's true that his prose is nothing special or fancy. But he clearly has a lot of control over language and storytelling. I'd like now to go back and read this in the original German (I didn't realize it was a translation until I sat down to read it) and see what other reflections and echoes the writing might reveal among all the stories. In any case, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would, and I'm intrigued and ready to learn more when I get to work on my presentation tomorrow.

Review: Silver Linings Playbook

So I haven't done one of these for a while! But I love reviewing movies, almost as much as I love going to the movies, and last night I went to see Silver Linings Playbook as a way to get out of the house and see friends and get my mind off schoolwork for a few hours. I had seen the preview and thought it looked appealingly American and funny - two good qualities for a literature student in England, because, you know, a lot of dark and weird books to read and a lot of missing America. The movie wasn't exactly what I was expecting (although it is both very American and very funny), but the unexpected was all to the good. So here you go, a movie you should definitely see if you have any interest in what it's like to be diagnosed with a mental illness, or be undiagnosed with a mental illness, or fall in love, or fall out of love, or be American, or just be a person. I recommend it.

This picture basically sums up what I felt like during the first, maybe 15 minutes in the theater. Pat Solitano gets out of a mental hospital and goes back to live with his parents in Philadelphia and things aren't going well. For a while, it seems like the whole movie is going to be us following Pat's doomed attempt to "get in shape," physically and mentally, for his estranged wife, Nikki - doomed because she has a restraining order against him since he beat her lover to a pulp and got diagnosed with manic-depressive disorder. This isn't giving anything away, because all that drama is the starting point of the story. The real meat of it is what happens afterward, the story of dealing with a daily routine of no job and pills to take and trying to stay optimistic when the only goal you're clinging to is basically unreachable.

 The first sign of how good this movie is, and what a nuanced portrayal of mental illness it offers, is the sometimes tragic, sometimes hilarious blend of financial and emotional disarray with unfailing optimism and really deep family love and loyalty that Pat finds in his parent's house. His mom's refrain at moments of crisis, that it's game day (the family, but mostly his dad, are big Philadelphia Eagles fans) and she's making 'crabby snacks', is so pitiful and yet delivered with such a bright hope that it seems to sums up everything about this family. Pat is still prone to violent episodes, his father has been banned from the Eagles stadium for getting in too many fights, and neither of them has a job while Pat's older brother is thriving in his work and his marriage. They all end up hurting each other with words and sometimes fists, but hurting each other is the last thing they want to do. It's refreshing to see family eccentricity portrayed alongside such palpable family love, to be able to laugh at them and feel for them without feeling caught out in either emotion.

Actually, it's not just a movie about family. It's also about a wider community, including Pat Sr.'s best friend who roots for the opposite team, Pat's friend from the hospital, who keeps trying to get out and being escorted back (a running joke but also a pretty heart-rending glimpse into the endless paperwork and bureaucracy in which he is trapped), and Pat's friend from before, whose marriage is making him crazier than the people who've been diagnosed with actual mental disorders.

And then there's Tiffany, that friend's wife's sister. (But before I say anything else, can we just take a moment to appreciate Jennifer Lawrence's face in this still? She's wonderful.) After her husband died, she got herself a diagnosis and plenty of pills, and there's a hilarious exchange between her and Pat where they compare notes on the horrible effects of various medications. The rest of the movie integrates her into Pat's quest to recover his life and his happiness, because she's searching for some of the same things.

 The relationship between these two doesn't progress in your classic rom-com or dramatic romance style. In fact, you're never really sure where they're headed, because they interact like real people - if a little more explosively, with more mortifying awkwardness and more drastic mood swings. They stutter and stumble and make fools of themselves and still manage to carry on and make something of it.

Throughout the twists and turns of the movie, the directors, actors, etc. manage to keep an impressive balance of pathos and humor. In other works that do the same, that combination can be pretty aggressive, making us pull up short mid-laugh as we come face-to-face with horror. But in this movie, the laughs are mixed more mildly with pangs of recognition and moments of real empathy. Over and over, it gave me exactly the kind of feeling you get in real life when things are so desperate they're funny, or when something so awkward and inappropriate just slipped out of your mouth that you have no choice but to laugh at yourself. There's a particular moment when Pat Sr. is enraged, out in the middle of the night in his pyjamas yelling at a neighbor's son who's been pestering them, and then, in the middle of his diatribe, he just stops and gives up his anger. You can see him just take that step back and realize how ridiculous the whole situation is and decide it's not worth his time. In a straight drama, he would bring his rage to a cathartic breaking point and come away with some deep realization. In a straight comedy his fury would grow to exaggerated proportions and be turned to comic effect. But here, we're allowed to be sorry and laugh, without feeling contradictory or hypocritical.

It's not really a spoiler to say that the movie has a happy ending, because it's not clear until near the very end what scenario would actually constitute a happy ending for Pat or anybody. But you don't feel cheated or condescended to by the ending any more than by the humor. This is an honestly and believably optimistic movie. Pat's drive to get better is a kind of American dream that's easy to get behind and rewarding. I walked out of the movie happy, not because I'd escaped into a fantasy utopia, but because I'd been given a new perspective on my world and my life that made things look no less hard, but much more full of silver linings.

Lights!

It's that time of year...

 When the reindeer start showing up in all the shop windows...

And all the mannequins start wearing scarves with their pyjamas.

So by special request from the lovely Sunnie, here are some photos of the lovely lights and holiday decorations that went up all over town a couple of weeks ago. Happy December!

Snow

 

 Well, maybe just frost. But still.