Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Gilion from Rose City Reader. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.
I was nothing but a pimply little question mark on the day my sister and I first walked into Ken Jones Music in Etobicoke.
And so a semi-finalist in this year's Canada Reads content begins. I haven't read a music biography in quite awhile so am looking forward to the quick read this one promises to be.
Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the sea posts the opening paragraph (maybe two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s). This is the First Chapter First Paragraph meme.
My entry this week comes from Martha Cooley's The Archivist
With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. A cat is a mammal, a narcissist, a companion, a riddle.
Very true, very true. The complexity of human existence is best understood that everything connects to everything else in some fashion. Like Kevin Bacon.
Every Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the sea posts the opening paragraph (maybe two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s). This is the First Chapter First Paragraph meme.
Somewhere in the Bronx, only twenty minutes or so from the cemetery, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee. Pitchers of beer and of iced tea would be placed along the table at intervals and the bar left open--it being a regular business day--for anyone who wanted a drink.
The inclusion of the number of servings of food would be available is what pulled me in. Who were the 47 members of the funeral party? Why were they attending "Charming Billy's" funeral? A quiet yet emotionally evocative read.
For anyone who has read Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, it would seem to be an unadaptable story for the big screen. It is full of quick breaks and disjointed narratives, not exactly fodder for a major Hollywood motion picture. But screenwriter David Hare had other ideas and set about creating a screenplay that was not only true to the novel but also workable as a visual narrative, something that seems almost unachievable based on the prose alone, at least until you see the final product.
The Hours is a story that combines the tales of three women from different eras during the course of one day. The first tale centers on Virginia Woolf (played by the prosthetically enhanced Nicole Kidman), struggling with her internal conflicts while writing the novel “Mrs. Dalloway”. She is living in the country, removed from her beloved city of London in an attempt to keep her inner demons at bay. Virginia yearns for freedom from the safe yet confining boundaries instituted by her long-suffering husband Leonard (Stephan Devane). However, while these boundaries are indeed restrictive, they ultimately cannot keep Virginia from herself.
The second tale focuses on fifties housewife and mother, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore). Laura is unsuited for and uncomfortable with her surroundings, as portrayed through her pauses, quick glances, forced smiles and fake cheer. She is obsessively trying to read Mrs. Dalloway while tending to her young son (brilliantly played by Jake Rovello) and preparing a birthday cake for her husband (John C. Reilly). Her more-than-neighborly embrace with her friend Kitty (Toni Collette) is the catalyst for driving Laura towards a decision that has tragic and irreversible consequences for her family.
For the final tale, we shift to present-day Greenwich Village resident Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep). Clarissa is busy organizing a reception for her best friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet ravaged by AIDS who is being honored for his life’s work. Richard refers to Clarissa as Mrs. Dalloway since she shares many of the attributes of Woolf’s eponymous heroine. A brief reunion with an old friend (Jeff Daniels) brings all of Clarissa’s insecurities and emotional troubles regarding Richard bubbling to the surface in an outburst of anguish that can only be fittingly resolved through Richard’s own heartbreaking actions.
Throughout the film, the themes of homosexuality and suicide constantly surround the narrative. Besides Laura’s ‘friendly’ embrace with her neighbor, Woolf’s own well-documented bisexuality is touched upon in the film with a persuasive lip lock between the author and her sister (Miranda Richardson). It is both a revealing and uncomfortable moment as the audience gains more insight into how pained Virginia truly is because of her mental and emotional circumstances.
There is the openly lesbian Clarissa who is in a committed relationship with another woman (Allison Janey), and cares for her gay best friend. The openness of the former relationship is dealt with tastefully and matter-of-factly. In fact, the words ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ are not even mentioned in the film, a mature and respectful achievement given Hollywood’s excessive need to smack us over the head with stereotypes so that we will ‘get it’.
The theme of suicide runs through the film like a chronometer marking the hours. Laura contemplates it, Clarissa witnesses it and in the opening sequence, Woolf commits it. Each character presented struggles with some measure of depression that manifests itself through their relationships with others. Only in the most extreme situations, like Richard’s, is suicide considered the most freeing solution for unencumbering all those encompassed by the individual’s depression.
Individual stories are intercut more deliberately in the early going of the film, with the shots matching to provide a visual cohesiveness and clarity. As for opening lines, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” is one of the best in English literature. Stephen Daldry, the film’s director, uses this line as the perfect meter for opening the film. We are first shown Virginia writing it, then Laura reading it and finally Clarissa saying it out loud (and then proceeding to do just that). This cohesiveness is replaced later on with depression, despair, and death matching and combining the stories.
Much of the novel’s complexities reside in Cunningham’s revealing of the inner thoughts of all these women. Despite Hare’s wonderful script and Stephan Daldry’s inspired directing, it is impossible to truly convey visually what can only exist on an epistemological level. One knows that something is ‘off’ with Laura but there is no compelling reason presented as to why she is contemplating suicide or why she ultimately chooses not to in favor of a different form of abandonment.
This is the problem with trying to express depression visually; it is a complicated beast that refuses to be fully compartmentalized through words and actions. And without flashbacks or voice-over narration (a bold decision on Daldry’s part), establishing the emotional threads necessary to join a mentally unstable English novelist, a pregnant California housewife and a lesbian book editor in New York relies on assumptions, insinuations and editing precision.
It also, most crucially, must rely on the actors and here in lies the magnificence of The Hours. The film is resplendent with phenomenal performances from all involved, but most especially from the actresses playing the three main characters. Streep once again proves her acting verisimilitude in the role of Clarissa. She chooses to rush Clarissa, to have her in constant motion as her crutch for avoiding rather than confronting the cracks in her well-crafted exterior shell. When Clarissa is forced to stop by the narrative, Streep exhaustively portrays her breakdown in pained gushes as means to visually illustrate Clarissa’s inability to comprehend why she is not at peace with her life.
Kidman won numerous awards for her portrayal of Virginia, and deservedly so. She is able to superbly capture the self-awareness of a woman obsessed with understanding the madness that threatens to overtake her existence.
But most especially compelling is Julianne Moore who is breathtaking as the repressed Laura. She infuses Laura with a silent screaming just behind the sweet smile she poses to deflect invasion into her torturous thoughts and desires. Moore plays Laura’s fear close to the surface, making it seem like her breakdown is imminent at every turn. Her performance is subtle and unintrusive, but the delicate detailing Moore infuses into Laura’s every action is undeniably powerful.
The Hours is a little too dark, too depressing, too complex and perhaps too earnest in trying to accommodate all the actors comprising this film to be embraced by a wide audience. These would be valid complaints, as the story is not one you can easily breeze through without any emotional or psychological engagement with the narrative and characters. It is just not possible. But life is depressing and dark, and women’s lives are complex and rife with complications. This is the reality that the film is trying to express through these three women and their internal plights.
And there is nothing wrong or overdramatic with having a complicated, complex film like The Hours that focuses on women and the very real issues of fear, depression and repression that we endure and resolve everyday. What is wrong is that there are not enough of them to make people believe just how worthy and necessary these films are to the women who make them and to the women who watch them.
Author: Sylvia Nasar Publisher/Year: Simon & Schuster, 1998 Synopsis: How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.
"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who -- thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community -- emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim.
What Others Have To Say Salon
"Instead of facile theories, the reader enjoys wonder and astonishment -- frightened and intrigued by the intimate juxtaposition of genius and mental illness in a single beautiful mind."
Entertainment Weekly
"Nash's life is as rich and troubled as one would expect from a genius, and Nasar doesn't shy away from her subject's complexity -- or his faults."
The New York Times
"[Nasar] has a special knack for recreating the atmosphere of places like Fine Hall, and for thumbnail sketches of the characters who march through these pages, including many giants of 20th-century mathematics."
The New England Journal of Medicine
"Nasar has written an intriguing account of a fascinating man, of a "beautiful" mind, and of terrible madness. She has also written a deeply moving love story, an account of the centrality of human relationships in a world of nightmare and genius."
Author:Simon Winchestor Publisher/Year: HarperCollins, 1998 Synopsis: It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story — a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.
Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray’s offer was regularly — and mysteriously — refused.
Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor–that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane — and locked up in Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.
What Others Have To Say Salon
"The elegant curio [Winchester] has created is as enthralling as a good story can be and as informative as any history aspires to be."
The New York Times
"Mr. Winchester leads one to visualize the afflicted, guilt-ridden, demon-obsessed Minor alone in his cell patiently compiling his vast lists, corresponding with Murray and ardently seeking recognition. The vision is exceedingly poignant."
The New York Times (2)
"It's ironic that the O.E.D., now revered ''as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires,'' would demonstrate by its very method the degree to which English is not fixed but endlessly changing. "
San Francisco Chronicle
"[Winchester] has compiled enough history to create a fascinating Victorian vignette..."
The Washington Post
"Winchester's history of the OED is brisk and entertaining but sometimes exaggeratedly so; he risks sounding like an episode of "Lifestyles of the Victorian Sublibrarians."
Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by Gilion from Rose City Reader. Instructions are pretty clear: just share the opening sentence of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.
would seem to be an unadaptable story for the big screen. It is full of quick breaks and disjointed narratives, not exactly fodder for a major Hollywood motion picture. But screenwriter David Hare had other ideas and set about creating a screenplay that was not only true to the novel but also workable as a visual narrative, something that seems almost unachievable based on the prose alone, at least until you see the final product.![A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 [BEAUTIFUL MIND]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tt-Mffat6lT_5Y_kTeBtO3_5g3g1QTYw-jxBDact7gA62g6i24qNUGeD-XYwUpQssb3PzTK2Iqvxh2LYnDHoBK_XYaxSc1XMm6hVuDmTvk7dvCa5PCrUrGHeIHfrZFZzeYcEGthGBCcR23GBo3Ttn66yyUHkndk5iumdc8NqXkVmOjx-uFRan_MAohZZVU1hGAB0S8rJuBBm7mx__8PM_HGNfOY1X5n5jTkefYSQmD=s0-d)
