Monthly Archives: August 2002

Contradiction

Yesterday was another odd day.

I met with Ceri to exchange our creative efforts for the two previous weeks, and I was late; I had been involved in my writing, finally looked at the clock, and proceeded to dash about trying to print things out, change, and catch a bus. I hate being rushed. I also dislike waking up and being slightly out of sorts, which I was yesterday; not in a bad mood, just slightly out of step with everything else. Ceri offered me tea and made me a grilled cheese sandwich, like any good Maritimer would if you collapsed in their kitchen and said, “I feel wrong.” It helped. So did the Advil.

I had dinner with MLG which was as enjoyable as always, and yet uncomfortable on other levels. We’d made the date previous to my implosion on Sunday, so rather than having an evening getting away from it all, we ended up troubleshooting and problem-solving, which isn’t a bad thing, just not what I had originally intended. Although I am an excellent listener, I am admittedly reluctant to ask people for help, and these days I’m incredibly blessed to have people who see that I need it and give it to me whether I’ve asked or not. I think that reluctance partially stems from the belief that my feelings and problems are private, and partially from the desire to not burden others (who have their own problems) with mine as well. To a certain extent, it’s also learned behaviour: throughout high school and CEGEP, my friends would pour their problems out to me, but when I tried to share my own, they were uninterested. The idea that people are determined to get me to talk and open up is rather new. I am, however, looking forward to a day when I can have a conversation with other adults that doesn’t revolve around my problems. I get twitchy when a conversation rests on me for too long and start looking for a place to hide, and when you’re in a corner at a pub with a single rather sharp individual, hiding is rather difficult. I suppose this is good for me – doesn’t it build character or something?

Apart from dinner being terribly delicious (nothing like colcannon when you need comfort food!) and being introduced to Boddingtons, I acquired a battery for my laptop, hurrah! I got home and spent an embarrassing amount of time looking for the slot to install it before realising that the only logical place for it to go was the CD-ROM drive slot, so I took out the disc drive and lo and behold, the battery slid right in. The unit didn’t self-destruct when I turned it on this morning, so I must have done something right – it has even produced a battery indicator on the display. I feel more freedom already. The Loyola campus library is three minutes away from me, and I have many fond memories of hours spent there before and after class during my BA years; there’s also a perfectly lovely park across the way which I will have to test out soon as a writing location as well.

I have an odd contradiction of feeling about my home these days. I want to cocoon, to stay home, read, and write; on the other hand, I’m feeling a little house-bound by the recent weather and want to be Out Doing Things. The latter is a very new experience for me, so I’m indulging it at the right times. In fact, Ceri and I are headed for more fabric stores today, questing for the perfect trim for sewing projects. Little expeditions like this are just perfect; they get me out, I can read on the metro, I share a couple of hours with another intelligent life form other than a cat, and then I’m home again. I have discovered by not working for an employer during the week, I no longer feel like I Have To Have Fun on my days off; as a result, when the sun goes down I no longer feel as if I’ve wasted a day somehow. This is a definite improvement.

They say it will rain this weekend. They said that last weekend too. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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Yesterday was a very odd day.

Friends came over on Saturday, which was fine, and enjoyable. I started a slow simmering anger when I woke up, however, when I realised that not a jot of the housework had been done before my husband had left for work that morning. I dislike being taken advantage of (haven’t we had this post already?), but worse than that, I hate people who just don’t think. So on top of all the things I had to do on my own personal list, I single-handedly cleaned up the entire apartment, did three loads of dishes, scrubbed, swept, and pressed the first man who arrived for the afternoon into vacuuming, since I’m not tall enough to use the appliance (let’s just not go there, okay?), let alone control the mad thing.

I think things would have been all right again if my husband had come home later. Instead, he walked in half an hour after all the cleaning had been finished – an easy day at work, and they’d ended early. He showered and sat down with the rest of us, nice and relaxed.

So long as I ignored him, I was fine. I thought things were all right by the time the last people left and I went to bed. I woke up the next morning, though, just as angry, and in no mood to be in company with anyone at all. This was a great pity, since I had agreed to sit down with a couple of other people to do a bit of writing exercise. I had a choice: I could try to force myself into the right frame of mind to do it, or I could graciously bow out and make it easier for everyone else.

I bowed out. I wrote a short apology to the co-ordinator of the exercise and left it for her, then practically ran out the front door before anyone could ask me questions.

I fled, basically, and didn’t tell anyone where I was going or how long I’d be. For some reason I absolutely couldn’t stand the thought of being around people I knew, or in my own house, or certainly being polite and civil. I ended up wandering through secondhand bookstores, the new Les Ailes complex, and reading in a cafe for a while. It was good for me to get out.

No doubt practical people are thinking, “Well, if there was a problem with your husband, why didn’t you just tell him?” Because, o sage and pearl-dispensing readers, it wasn’t just him. Certainly I had an issue with him, but what would it end up being phrased as? “Why can’t you wash the dishes while you’re waiting for your coffee in the mornings”? It was more than the dishes; the dishes and the clutter were symbols of other stuff, and things that have been building for a while. Until I figured out what the real problem was, I wasn’t engaging in any kind of mutual conversation about the situation.

Since being in my own house was grating, I left it. And it felt rather good just walking out without a backward glance, without leaving an estimated time of return, without an indication of where I might be. I didn’t turn my cell phone on, either. I had no clear destination in my mind; I certainly didn’t want to drop by anywhere where I’d run into someone I knew, so other than that, it was driven purely by whim. I didn’t return until four and a half hours later.

Something I noticed while I was out was other people’s conversations. When you’re out with someone, you’re usually talking with them, focusing on their conversation to the exclusion of everyone elses’ words. If other conversations make it through to your ears, it’s because they’re being loud and obnoxious, and hence you become irritated. Being alone, however, means you don’t have someone else’s words to fill up the space, and you hear what everyone else has to say.

Everyone is unhappy. With themselves, with their lives, with others. And it made me wonder – if no one is happy… why do we even bother?

Other than that, the other major discovery I made was that I am, for some unknown reason, interested in clothes again.

My clothes rarely wear out, and my shape doesn’t change, so I usually get about a decade’s worth of wear out of an article of clothing. This means I buy things that I fall in love with, or t-shirts because I need them. I tend to hate trendy things, so wearing out-of-date styles isn’t a danger. Yesterday, however, I walked into a couple of boutiques, and realised that I hadn’t been clothes shopping seriously for over six years. And, for some odd, unfathomable reason… I wanted to.

My wardrobe can stand with a good, severe cleaning out. And I figure with about six hundred dollars, I can replace it with a decent, sturdy, timeless set of clothing that will see me through for another six years or so, and through whatever career I end up in. I love the tailored stuff that’s out there now, and the cream/chocolate colours that are showing up with all the fall clothes, too, and the long charcoal grey cardigan sweaters with the belts…

As I realised this, I had an odd sort of shock. Clothes shopping is a girl-type thing. I dislike shopping intensely as a rule; I dislike the clothes in stores as a rule as well. Where this urge arose from, I cannot tell, but it is disconcerting in the extreme.

I have a suspicion that I am going through some sort of chrysalis stage. Who I’ll be on the other side is a mystery, though. I wonder if I’ll like myself.

Possession: The Response

Hmmm.

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.

The last images faded from the screen, and we looked at each other, and she made a face, and I laughed and said, “What was that face all about?”, and we both went, “Hmmm” in a thoughtful fashion.

We know the book too well. We couldn’t get into the movie. We need someone who’s never read the book but who is sympathetic to the academic atmosphere to see it, and tell us if it succeeds as a movie in and of itself, which we cannot.

We tried. We talked about it with a couple of other teachers for a while afterwards; we had cakes and tea at Calories and tried to puzzle it out (and apart from the costuming, that cappuccino truffle cake was the high point of the day). The book had so much more that we were constantly aware of what was missing. The story didn’t appear to suffer; the depth of the emotion, however, did. Our final conclusion is that the pacing seemed wrong, somehow – it was the same pace from beginning to end, no exciting bits, no slower parts to sit back and take in… just, well, plodding along. Alas indeed, for Possession is a tale of undeniable attraction and, yes, fateful unfolding, but there’s more to it than “A leads to B, just follow the paper trail.”

And it was short – it was just about an hour and a quarter! I really and truly feel that there was so much more to this movie that was left on a cutting room floor. It felt sparse. Now, that might be due to the fact that we know the novel so well, but knowing that the movie has been in re-editing for two years leads me to believe that there were other levels to the movie that were abandoned. It did feel, well, dumbed down a bit. Granted, academic romances aren’t truly the thing to seize the American populace’s imagination, but the book had an irresistible draw to it that pulled the reader in with words and subtext. The film failed in that respect; it felt a bit tepid. The end, too, was rushed, which was unnecessary considering how short the running time is. Finally, the elimination of the poetry from the whole thing cut out an entire dimension of the novel. The poets fall in love through their poetry, as well as their letters. They exchange pieces of verse, telling stories, exploring issues about male and female identity and placing within the social and natural world (couched in Victorian poetry – makes for lush reading, let me tell you!) For a movie that claims to be about the sensuous use of words, limiting the poet’s writing to letters on-screen seems dreadfully severe.

Was the creative team concerned that the average American wouldn’t get it? We were told at every step of the turn, rather than shown. An issue that arose in discussion later revolved around audiences: the sort of people who are going to see this movie are likely to be the ones who have read the book (or Byatt’s work in some form), hence able to exercise intellectual ability to some degree. Dumbing it down was, in our opinion, unnecessary. And by dumbing it down, the urgency surrounding the unfolding research and revelation is lost, particularly at the end. (Connected and yet not: I didn’t mind the main male character being American. Not at all. It was fine.)

Visually, it was perfect – settings (modern and Victorian), costuming, characterisation… the stage trickery was brilliant as well. No special effects for Possession – when the Victorian characters walk out of a room, close the door, and the modern characters walk right into it, stagehands have moved false walls and silently switched furniture to effect the change. Gabriel Yared’s music was excellent as well, a wonderfully unintrusive companion to the visuals (except for that operatic piece used in the end credits). The editing between eras was also excellently done.

Something else I noticed, however, is that the title appears meaningless. With the apparent lack of emotional involvement, the term “possession” doesn’t connect anywhere. The word is never used (although “obssession” is); nor do the various applications of the term ever come into question (except through a certain minor character’s appearance at the opening auction, attempting to buy up as many pieces of a poet’s literaria as possible – and even then, I think I might only have realised the significance because there are so many mentions of his obssession to own these and other ephemera in the book) in any way. I don’t know if any audiences are going to be astute enough to catch that (or care to question it if they do), but it did bother me.

I’m going to sleep on it for a couple of weeks, then I’ll catch a matinee on a Tuesday and try again. Maybe now that my mind’s gone through the requisite “this as compared to the original book”, I’ll be able to approach it as a piece of art in its own right.

Possession: Feeling Wary

I’m going to see a movie today, and I am trepidatious.

I rarely see movies; they’re too darned expensive for what they are, and frankly, Hollywood sucks. The Paramount is dreadful too. Thirteen fifty for an hour and a half of second-rate entertainment? Not bloody likely. I also find the Paramount too flashy – loud, bright, sparkly… just the thing for people with no attention spans. It gives me a headache. If I see movies, I try to see them in any of the smaller theatres, just on principle.

Three years ago (bear with me, this is pertinent) I began writing my thesis. I wrote about three modern British novels set in academic surroundings, namely, A.S.Byatt’s Possession, Graham Swift’s Waterland, and David Lodge’s Nice Work. (I passed brilliantly, thank you very much for asking.) Possession is a book I have loved since it was published in 1990.

For as long as I can remember (no, this is pertinent too) I have generally been disappointed by movies based on books. (Until Fellowship of the Ring came along, bless Peter Jackson’s little heart, and the hearts of his creative team, too.) They’re inevitably flat, and miss the point of the novel. I know they’re different forms of storytelling, but they’re so different that I find directors in search of a hit movie discard the heart of the novel in their single-mindedness. Notable exceptions to this rule include Howard’s End (but not Remains of the Day, alas), and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (thanks be to all the supreme beings out there), as well as the aforementioned LOTR:FotR.

For the past year and a half, there has been a movie of Possession being retouched and re-edited. At first I was delirious – a movie! They’ve made a movie of one of my favourite books! And then the reality sank in – what if they ruined it? In fact, ruination was likely, considering that it finished shooting over two years ago, they set three different release dates, and scrapped them all. When I discovered that they’d changed the main characters around, I sank further into despair. No, no, no – the fact that both main characters are British is integral to the plot! If they make one American, that means one of the main plot threads is eliminated! Woe!

Equally as delighted at first when we discovered the movie was in the works, another Eng Lit MA agreed that when it finally came out, we’d see it together. Two years later, today is that day. Possession is premiereing this afternoon, and we will be in the audience. (And it’s not at the Paramount – sigh of relief!)

Now, it’s got Gwyneth Paltrow, so it can’t be that bad. It also has Jeremy Northam (who was deliriously good in Emma). And the basic story – that of two modern-day academics slowly uncovering a hithero unknown and certainly unsuspected romance between their respective academic focii, both poets of the Victorian era, through letters and poems. (Give me a break – I’m an academic, and the thought of making such a discovery is heavenly. This sort of thing makes me all weak in the knees.) The book moved back and forth between the modern researchers and the epistolary evidence, so it was, in effect, two novels in one. The term “Possession” ends up being significant on several levels, namely the ownership of body, heart, historical documents, and of course, the spiritual control exterted by another entity, as well as the concept of self-control. (I wrote a thesis on this, remember? They gave me a degree for it.)

The film would be pretty boring if all it showed was modern academics flipping through piles of letters, relying on them to read the information about the Victorian pair aloud, or (even worse) having the camera focus on a handwritten letter in silence for the audience to read. Hence, the Victorian poets have been brought to life for their scenes. Right away, I wince; the point of the novel was to have the poets live only through their words. I know perfectly well this can’t work on-screen, and that due to the story-telling medium the portrayal must change. Apparently, though, Antonia Byatt read the scripts and gave her blessing and approval, believing that the spirit of her story was being preserved. When an author is comfortable with a film, then I know that I too am likely to be comfortable.

The web site describes it as:

“a lushly romantic study of both the transcendent power of language and the seductive nature of literary mystery. In this case, the mystery spirals beyond the past and into the present. Bridging the two eras is the language of love, expressed in grand physical passions yet also at its fullest in the written word.”

Well, even if I’d never read the book before, I’d be hooked: power of language, history, literary mysteries. I told you, this stuff makes me weak in the knees.

So away we go. I am attempting not to have any expectations whatsoever. Alas, however, I do have high standards when it comes to things like this. At least I haven’t re-read the book before seeing it, a sure way to make me hate the movie. No, I’ll read it again soon, after having allowed the movie to sink in for a while. If the movie makes sense on its own, it succeeds. If upon re-reading the book, the movie still works, it gets a big shiny star next to its name and goes on my future DVD list. And, who knows? I might even want to see it in theatres again…

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I read a book yesterday.

I deliberately didn�t use an adjective, because I can�t settle on one. Yes, it was fantastic; terrific; well-written; thought-provoking; well-told. All of them, though, limit it in some way.

It was Christopher Priest�s The Prestige, and I read it in a single day.

On the surface, it�s a story about a contemporary journalist, certain he had a twin brother in his childhood yet with no records to prove it, who rediscovers his family history. His great-grandfather was a stage magician, an illusionist, and was engaged in a bitter rivalry with another illusionist.

In the murky depths of the unfolding story, however, it�s much more than that. The story passes from the journalist, to his great-grandfather, to the woman who has contacted the journalist, to her great-grandfather who is, of course, the rival illusionist. By the end, you realise that the story isn�t about any one character really; if I had to pin down a character I�d say the story revolves around the rival illusionist, but even so, each portion of the narrative is so interwoven with the rest that they cannot stand in their own.

It takes a large part of the novel before the reader begins to suspect, and eventually realise, the central conceit of the novel. One or two minor aberrations in storytelling style are put down to a charcter’s tortured conscience, until three-quarters of the way through, the diary of the rival journalist reveals those aberrations for what they truly are. Robbed of a mystery? Hardly. The rival illusionist goes on to create what actually stands as the central conceit of the novel, and as a reader, you don�t feel cheated at all.

The layers involved are masterfully created, and well-revealed at the correct moments. Technically, this book is a fantasy; well, it revolves around a fantastic concept. But, well, it�s also science fiction � just science fiction set at the turn of the twentieth century. And it really could be a thriller, too. Well-written books that challenge genre fascinate me. It means the author had a story to tell, and chose not to be chained to a genre�s expectations. (As opposed to an author who simply cannot stay within a genre�s requisite boundaries; that�s just bad writing, and produces an unsatisfactory book.)

Let�s look at that for a moment, actually; it�s relevant. If you write within a genre, there are certain tenets you have to bide by. However, you�re not bound to turn out a stereotypical cardboard story; far from it. Genre writing means you have to push the envelope from within those boundaries, find some way to tell the story anew, involve the tenets in such a way that creates a unique example of the genre.

By deliberately not choosing a genre, Priest has kept his readers from settling comfortably into a set of expectations. (It also means he reaches a broader audience, but that�s beside the point.) Without knowing what guidelines he�s writing by (if he�s writing by any genre guidelines at all) a reader can�t run down a mental checklist and say, �Okay, I expect A, B, C, and D from this book, now I�ll sit down and mark them off as I go.� (No, I don�t actually know of anyone who does this consciously, but it does happen subconsciously, and if you’re deprived of something, you end up unsatisfied. Well, no, I do it consciously if the book is dreadful: �Oh yes, there�s the requisite B event; now C must occur.�)

The Prestige surprised me in that Priest didn�t truly explain the fantastic/science-fictional elements at all. The last three or four chapters could have been expanded; he could have showed his readers how clever he was. He didn�t. He left the reader holding a book and blinking a bit at the end. I turned back a dozen or so pages and reread the ending, in fact, just to make sure I didn�t miss the revelation.

I admire authors who are secure enough to do things like this. No, you don�t have to explain it all to the masses. Assume we�re intelligent and let us figure the nuances out. In addition, an author who bucks the trend of a tragic or a happy ending and leaves the reader with a handful of loose ends snarled with knots is a courageous one. As humans living messy lives, we generally like our fiction (in form of film, or story, or whatever) to have nice, tidy endings, where everyone gets what�s coming to them. I love stories that don�t actually end. The main episode being told concludes, but the characters and their lives go on, without a perfect, pat �The End� to crown the tale. In general, however, I believe that I am in the minority, alas. The general populace needs that �The End� on the screen or on the final page of the book to contain the story, to know that there was a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. (Not that I think we can blame this on junior high English teachers.)

Life�s not like that, though. There is no Beginning other than birth; there is no End but death, and even then just because we can�t turn the page to see what happens after that final breath doesn�t mean that there is nothing to see. Our lives are intricate, with several different events and stories happening simultaneously. After an event, an episode, we go on � changed, perhaps, but we go on, our lives rarely altered in any major, drastic fashion on the surface. I like to have that sense in a story as well. Granted, storytelling is by its nature artificial; yet I enjoy a sense of reality to it. Reality doesn�t mean a stream of consciousness, an every-event-that-happens-in-a-day sort of reality; that would be too boring for words. Storytelling, however, doesn�t need to be about apocalyptic events. It can be intensely personal.

Which is what Christopher Priest�s The Prestige is about. Two men, their secrets (personal and professional), their lives becoming more and more challenged with obsession and physical secrecy. Their descendants, deeply affected by those professional secrets. The processes by which magic (stage and scientific magic) can occur. And, of course, the consequences.

Apparently he�s written at least eight other books. You can be sure I�ll be tracking them down.