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One of my favorite Kindle subscriptions is to the New York Times Book Review, a once-a-week offering well worth the few bucks it costs. This week's edition had some nice tidbits:

* Curtis Sittenfeld's master class in how to write a negative review (in this case of Monica Ali's new novel about a fictionalized Princess Diana who fakes her own death and moves to America). 

* Leah Hager Cohen's simple observation: "We are [. . .] incapable of not doing wrong."

* Danzy Senna's quotation of Robert Penn Warren: "You live through [. . .] that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History."

* Sometimes you just have to tell it like it is. Michael Hofmann: "[This is] a very bad book on a very terrible subject."

*Andrew Delbanco's review of Mightier than the Sword (David Reynold's book on Harriet Beecher Stowe), which reminds us of her significance: "[she] mobilized public opinion against slavery, and proved, against long odds, 'a white woman's capacity to enter into the subjectivity of black people.'" Imperfectly, to be sure, but quite a feat for its time.

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Cheers (and rest in peace) to one of the most likable personalities ever to grace the screen. I actually Netflixed an early season of Columbo a year ago, and it was just as good as I remembered.

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I got a goodbye kiss in the morning, woke up later to a breakfast tray of fruit and cheese that Jay had put together for me, got a massage, got my hair done, and went off to Cylburn Arboretum to get married.
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When I told Jay that I was spreading my bad attitude around, he said I was "Johnny Applecrap."
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I love the incantatory rhythm of this verse at the end of the Prologue of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan (from c. 1200):

This is bread to all noble hearts.
With this their death lives on.
We read their life, we read their death,
and to us it is sweet as bread. 

Their life, their death are our bread.
Thus lives their life, thus lives their death,
Thus they live still and yet are dead,
and their death is the bread of the living. 

And whoever now desires to be told of their life,
their death, their joy, their sorrow,
let him lend me his heart and ears—
he shall find all that he desires!
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We know that only 1 out of every 5 Woody Allen films is good these days. But since he makes a movie a year, that means every 5 years there's a winner. And Midnight in Paris is his winner for the first half of the 2010s.

The movie tells the story of a 30-something Hollywood scriptwriter, Gil, who comes with his fiancee to visit her parents, who are in Paris for a week or so. Owen Wilson is perhaps the best ever Woody Allen avatar: good-looking (so that his romance with the gorgeous fiancee, played by Rachel McAdams, is plausible) without being conventionally handsome; and a finely tuned version of the neurotic, stuttering idealist. Gil has an affinity to the traditional Woody Allen protagonist, but the tics are turned down 90% and the charm up 90%.

Rachel McAdams as the fiancee Inez is a harpy, as are her materialistic parents, and it's hard to see why these two are together, aside from Gil's potential for wealth and Inez's rocking body. But her parents are genuinely funny and pitch-perfect for their role ("Cheap is cheap" has already entered our home humor lexicon). And Inez is given a modicum of respectability by the fact that, while Gil is pining for the good old days, her character is living the good new days, going dancing every night while he mopes.

Luckily, the moping doesn't carry on too long (and here's where the spoilers begin). Gil is taken with walking in the rain through Paris, an activity Inez finds ridiculous, and one night at midnight he is lured into a car by a rowdy group of revelers. He finds himself in another time period, surrounded by his literary and artistic heroes. And the movie takes off into a exploration of his ideal world and what it means for himself and his future.

There are touches here of previous Allen films: the fantasy aspect of The Purple Rose of Cairo, the social criticism of Crimes and Misdemeanors, the cast of celebrity cameos (which are utterly great here; brava, Carla Bruni!); and so on. One critic rightly pointed out that these character types--the social climbers, the young man who idolizes Hemingway--feel a little dated. It's funny: we live in a really exciting time culturally, and with YouTube and blogs, people are more than ever creators of their own art, excited about culture now. When I was a teenager is the 1970s, there was a huge sense that we had just missed the 60s, just missed the awesomest decade ever. That's why people my age are sometimes referred to as Generation Jones, because we grew up jonesing for an identity based on something other than feeling cheated. The 70s were followed by the glitzy, obnoxious 80s, and Woody Allen's nostalgia for previous eras was really developed in these two decades in tandem with a sharp sense of the simultaneous cheesiness and pretentiousness of his own time. It was only with Manhattan and Manhattan Murder Mystery (relatively late films) that you feel him embracing the present.

But Midnight in Paris is a fine film. It balances nostalgia with realism. It's funny and well told. And it tells an ever-wonderful story: that of a person getting back in touch with their authentic self. It's full of beautiful shots of Paris and rejects cynicism. And it ends with Gil meeting someone on the street at night and starting to stroll along with them while it gently begins to rain.

I love when films do this, incorporate meaning in purely visual elements. One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema is the ending of Babette's Feast. At the end of this movie, after a rare, magical evening of food and companionship, the spinster sisters in an isolated northern town reflect on the loveliness of the experience and speculate that maybe it won't even snow this year; after they leave the darkened room, the camera remains on the window, where you can see the first flurries coming down.

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Some pieces from this designer were featured in In Style recently---so beautiful. Here is more of her work. (The shoes are a collaboration with Payless, so yay!)

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Sunrise:

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On a whim last week I bought this little device at CVS called a Deep Action Cleanser:

(The packaging was a little different than the pic above.)

I was motivated to try this because I got microdermabrasion at a spa recently. In this procedure, the tech goes over your face with what is essentially a bit of sandpaper on a vibrating stick. It felt great---like my skin was super smooth afterward. But the price tag was rather outrageous. So I decided to get a home kit and compare results.

The price was right (I think my kit was $15) and the results: very nice. It's not quite as intense as the spa version, but not negligible either.  Thumbs up!
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Whatever may have preceded it, I get off the phone with my friend and feel deeply okay about life.
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Now I'm on to this Swedish mystery, by Camilla Lackberg. It's a really good read so far. But there is this problem, which is a pitfall for mystery writers. The dead woman's best friend is searching through her apartment. It's known that the victim was pregnant when she was killed, but not by her husband. While searching the apartment, the best friend finds a nude painting of the woman done by a local artist; the painting is hidden in her closet. Her next thought is (roughly): "Did she have this portrait done for her husband? For her lover? Hmm." The problem is, the reader is smart enough to know the painter could be (probably is) her lover. And the fact that the author does not have her protagonist think of this is even more confirmation.

This is a tough thing for mystery writers: How to dribble out the clues in a slow enough fashion so that there is actually a book to be read but without making the protagonists obtuse.

The appeal of mystery novels is manifold. There's the puzzle aspect and the psychological aspect. And there's also the very intriguing experience of observing the process of consciousness itself, how our minds take in information, use intuition, waffle between insight and blankness, see the light go on. It's important to get that interior development right.

One reason I loved the Stieg Larsson trilogy so much is that, unlike most thrillers, a good part of the plot consists of the good guys implementing a trap for the bad ones. A nice change from the good guys trailing after the bad guys, trying to catch a whiff.
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Just finished this enjoyable YA novel, the first in a series with the usual scrappy teenage heroine, dashing hero, supernatural elements, and quest plot. Here's one passage I enjoyed, a comment by the heroine's close friend:  "'You can't trust anyone,' said Lesley, just like my mother. 'If we were in a film, the villain would turn out to be the least-expected person. But as we aren't in a film, I'd go for the character who tried to strangle you.'"
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1. Lovely time sitting on the deck this afternoon, soaking in the vitamin D and being amazed by the hummingbirds.

2. This week have read Chretien de Troyes, Tristan, Parzifal, and soon the Niebelungenlied. Am very much looking forward to getting past the 13th century.

3. Scrambled eggs for dinner made extra scrumptious by the fresh herbs from the pots on the deck.

4. Bought a hard copy of Rapt, a meditation on "focus" as the main constituent of our life and experience. I've just skimmed a few parts, but was completely, well, rapt. Read some to Jay and he bought a version for his Kindle. He won't read paper books anymore.
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I'm very torn here between "Take me to December 21 NOW" and "What the?"

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Tina Fey's Bossypants, her new book of essays, is a great read, funny and smart. But there's one bit I've been mulling over. Fey is an unabashed feminist, and she urges girls (and women) to stop talking in the tentative, sing-song style that has become the lingua franca of American females. You know? The kind that start high and gets higher? And ends with a question? Like, "Hi, I'm Tiffany. I'll be your server tonight?" Fey says, C'mon, do you think a a heart patient wants to go into a doctor's office and hear, "I'm Dr. Wallace? I'll be your cardiac surgeon?"

But I'm not so sure. There's nothing inherently wrong or weak about this speaking style. It's caught on for a reason, maybe because it projects a sense of compromise or lack of aggression, things that are not bad, really. Maybe our knee-jerk reaction to the idea of a brilliant doctor talking like this is because we're clinging to an old, strictly male idea of what brilliance looks like. But that idea comes out of a tradition that was exclusionary, biased, and paternalistic.

Instead of women trying to emulate traditional male ways of talking and being, maybe we should just go ahead and be who we are, without shame or cringing. And eventually, here's what will happen:  People will get used to going in for surgery and hearing their doctor say, "I'm Dr. Wallace? I'll be your cardiac surgeon?" And they will perceive it as normal. They will accept that this is how brilliant doctors talk.
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Great night at Camden Yards last night. Good company, great weather, and a grand slam from a .186 batter to win the game.

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Don't sue me, bro.

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This Goose Stole My Keen Sandals

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Thank you, Cute Overload.
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