A Certain Slant of Light

I loved Haifaa al-Mansour’s debut film Wadjda, so I’ve been meaning to watch Nappily Ever After since it first appeared on Netflix in September, but what with one thing and another I didn’t manage it till this month.

It’s a well-made movie, and it’s nice to see a movie with a majority black cast - and making the heroine black gives new life to the somewhat tired storyline of “uptight career woman learns to let her hair down and finds love and probably quits her high-powered job.” The cultural and political history of black hair gives “letting her hair down” new meaning and resonance, for instance. (I really liked the way the movie was organized by different hairdos - almost like chapter breaks.)

But I’m probably never going to really love any iteration of that basic storyline, unless maybe someone did “uptight career woman finds love with someone who loves her in all her uptight glory.” Which is not so much an iteration as a totally different story.

Also, it occurs to me that that story is the Netflix film Like Father (although the love in that version is platonic). So the trail has been blazed! More versions can follow!

I have complained in the past that modern stories (both books and movies) suffer from a dearth of picnics. There are nineteenth-century novels that are basically just a series of good times all strung together like a necklace of beads, picnics and flower picking and canoe trips on sun-dappled streams, but how often do you see this in any more recent production?

My friends, I have found the movie. It is Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait and it is essentially a string of meals, mostly in beautiful restaurants, also some sightseeing, and there is one actualfax picnic by the side of the Rhone after the car breaks down on their drive to Paris.

The plot, such as it is, is simple. Anne (Diane Lane) is married to a workaholic movie producer who gets called away from their vacation in Cannes to a meeting in Budapest. He enlists his production partner Jacques to drive Anne to Paris.

The rest of the movie is their long, meandering drive to Paris, which is simultaneously my greatest dream - all those meals! with about six courses each! fifteen types of cheese in a frickin’ cheese basket at the end! and one night Jacques orders Anne every single chocolate dessert in the restaurant, because who doesn’t want to try every single dessert, and to hell with the waste!!! - but also kind of a nightmare, because Anne is stuck driving with this guy who has no sense of time and keeps detouring to Lyon so they can try the rabbit.

But, then again, she is on vacation, so it’s not like he’s making her late to anything, and he’s a great guide: knowledgeable about everything, and able to share his knowledge in an entertaining fashion, and in particular knowledgeable about food and wine.

He’s also 100% interested in having an affair with her, but he’s never creepy or aggressive about it. He just occasionally reminds her that he’s available, if she so desires, and has the hotel send a breakfast tray up to her room with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate because he’s not sure which one she’d like best.

I’m not usually a fan of stories about infidelity, but by the end I was kind of rooting for them to have an affair after all. There’s so much more France they could see together! So many more meals to eat, so much wine to drink, so many riversides to walk on! Anne’s movie producer husband doesn’t seem like a bad guy, but, you know, he is a bit neglectful. They’ve probably never had a riverside picnic together in all their lives.

Lo these many years ago, back in… 2012… I signed up for a 100 posts challenge, on the topic “100 Books that Influenced Me,” and then petered out in the early forties.

But it’s occurred to me that if I wrote a post a week, I could finish the challenge in a little over a year, and after all I love writing about my favorite books, so why not? Mostly I write about books that I’m reading now; it will be nice to give myself the opportunity to talk about old favorites.

This week: Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, which was my very favorite thing when I was small. The book (actually a sequence of five books) is about a family of tiny people, less than a foot high, who live in the walls of human houses and support themselves by borrowing (well, stealing) from their human hosts.

The heroine is Arrietty Clock, who at fourteen (which seemed to me a most impressive age) has never left her family’s home under the clock in the kitchen of a quiet Victorian country home. But that’s about to change: in the absence of a son, Arrietty’s mother insists that Arrietty needs to learn to borrow, just in case something happens to her father. Because, after all, something has happened to her father: he’s been Seen, seen by a full-size human being, a boy (recuperating from an illness he contracted in India - the most classic Victorian backstory) whom the Clocks didn’t know was in the house until too late.

I loved the adventurous aspect (leaving her home for the first time to experience the wide world!), the setting (this book might be the genesis of my love of Victorian England), the details about tiny people living in a big world: Arrietty rolling an onion down the corridor from the storeroom so her mother can cut a single ring off of it to put in their soup. And of course Arrietty herself: she’s a thoroughly satisfactory heroine.

The US edition is beautifully illustrated by Joe and Beth Krush, who also illustrated Elizabeth Enright’s Gone-Away Lake. I poured over the pictures of Arrietty’s overstuffed Victorian parlor, all built up of bits and pieces repurposed for the use of tiny people: spools of thread used as stools, postage stamp pictures of Queen Victoria hung on the wall as portraits.

I was so taken with the idea of tiny people that I beguiled many hours in kindergarten envisioning the adventures of tiny people living in the school walls. I spent some time worrying what they ate during summer vacation, when we weren’t around to provide half-eaten rice krispie treats for their delectation, before deciding that they probably migrated to the park up the hill behind the school and lived in bucolic bliss till we all trundled back to school.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

- publish a paperback edition of Briarley
- revise & publish Ashlin & Olivia
- revise the Civil War book, which still needs a title, must get on that.
- finish writing the other Civil War book, the one where one of Morgan’s Raiders comes back to a town he raided in hopes of marrying the girl who refused to let the raiders take her pig. Based on a true story!
- come up with an idea for a third Civil War book. I feel that they’ll do better if they’re a trilogy. Can I somehow work in the guy who was shot in the neck during the war and coughed out the bullet twenty years later? MAYBE.
- write the Little Red Riding Hood story, the one where the girl is a Russian peasant and the wolf is a student revolutionary who was cursed into wolf form by the fellow members of her revolutionary cell for suggesting that maybe selling their souls to the Devil might backfire.

This is probably enough writing goals to be getting on with. I would like to write some fanfic too (in fact, I’ve still got my Chocolate Box fic to write), but we’ll see where the spirit takes me on that one.

Inevitably, I've gotten behind on Snowflake Challenge. Such is life, I suppose.



In your own space, talk about your creative process(es) — anything from the initial inspiration to how you feel after something’s done. Do you struggle with motivation or is it a smooth process? Do you have any tricks up your sleeve to pull out when a fanwork isn’t cooperating? What is your level of planning to pantsing/winging it?

It really depends. Sometimes my motivation is so high that I fling myself at the story every time I have a free moment, but sometimes (like right now) I dawdle about opening the document, let alone actually working on the story. (I need to start revisions of Ashlin & Olivia and… I have been procrastinating for going on two weeks.)

Generally when I start writing something I have a general idea how I want it to end (they get together, they don’t get together, whatever - just a guidepost) and often I know some events that are going to happen along the way, although I don’t necessarily where in the story it goes or why it’s important, just that I want it to be there. Often I’ll write the beginning and then I’ll jump forward to the scenes that I know and then I’ll fill in the bits in between.

I’ve also started keeping a character list at the beginning of documents for longer stories, mostly so I can keep track of locations and the minor characters. “What did I call that coffee shop they like? What’s her English teacher’s name? Did I give her a brother again?” Now I can just check my cheat sheet rather than scrolling through the document.

Guess! who! got a copy of Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman!

Yes, it's obviously me. I AM EXCITE.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is quite brilliant. Why did I wait so long to read it?

No, actually I know exactly why I waited so long to read it: I’ve been avoiding it because Angelous was raped when she was eight and that’s a pivotal event in the book. But it’s not drawn out or graphic, although the after-effects linger, and there are so many other things going on in the book that it never feels like misery born. There’s a chapter where the entire black community where Angelou grew up gathers round her grandmother’s radio to hear Joe Louis fight which is particularly lyrical, and evokes the sense of community and the horrors of the Jim Crow south. The listeners go wild when he wins - but Angelou notes that everyone who walked into the countryside to listen to the match made arrangements to stay in town that night, because it would be dangerous to walk home at night with whites angry about Louis’s victory.

On a lighter note, I also finished Enid Blyton’s Third Term at Malory Towers. How has Gwendoline held out so long against the boarding school spirit? You’d think she’d break down and have some character growth eventually, but so far she’s immune.

What I’m Reading Now

Still listening to Dan Stevens’ read The Odyssey, which I’m enjoying a lot. Odysseus has finally left captivity on Calypso’s island (...someone’s written the fic about Odysseus the sex slave, right?) and made his way to the island of the Phaeacians. If I recall correctly from ninth-grade English, he’s going to tell the Phaeacians his whole sad story before he sets out for Ithaca, but we’ll see.

In high school I got kind of annoyed because Penelope spent so much time crying, but reading the book a second time round, I’ve noticed the parallel between Penelope’s situation and Odysseus’s. Penelope is beset by unwanted suitors; Odysseus is beset by Calypso. Penelope cries in her room; Odysseus has an actual crying chair where he sits and weeps as he looks at the sea every day. If anything, Penelope is more proactive than Odysseus: she promised to wed once she finished weaving a particular shroud, so each night she secretly unweaves what she wove that day. Odysseus just cries.

Of course Odysseus is up against a goddess, so there’s probably not much he can do.

I’ve also begun Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Nothing much to say about it so far, but will keep you posted on developments.

What I Plan to Read Next

In years past, I’ve always done one challenge per month for my yearly Reading Challenge, but I’m thinking this year I might barrel on through (at least for a while; I may lose steam and space the challenges out more by and by). Unnatural Death isn’t going to read itself, you know.

The Newbery awards for 2018 will be coming out this month! Probably not till the end of the month, but still, something to look forward to.

2018 is over, which means that my New Year’s Resolution is at its end - except that I’m ending the year with an even longer list of movies by female directors that I want to watch than I had at the beginning, so this is clearly going to become an ongoing project for me.

Some movies that I want to see, in no particular order:

I want to watch more of Dorothy Arzner’s and Ida Lupino’s movies. Arzner was the only female director in Hollywood in the 30s & 40s, and Lupino took up her mantel in the 50s & 60s (clearly female directors in mid-twentieth century Hollywood were like the Highlander: there can be only one) so they’re the spiritual grandmothers, so to speak, of female directors working in Hollywood today.

I’d also really like to see some silent films by female directors - there were actually more female directors working in the silent days than later on - but I’m not holding my breath on this one. Silent films in general were preserved quite piecemeal, so that we’ve lost even some films by big stars and famous directors, so who knows how many silents by female directors even still exist? But I’ll keep my eyes open, just in case.

Speaking of women who have managed to work mostly within the studio system, I’d also like to see the rest of Nora Ephron’s films: This Is My Life, Mixed Nuts, Michael, and Lucky Numbers. I’ve had very mixed reactions to her movies but I do love Julie and Julia, and in any case her work is an important part of women’s cinema history because she’s had more reach than a lot of other female filmmakers.

(Also a landmark: Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, the first film by an African-American woman released in theaters in the US. In 1991.)

For the same reason I’d like to see the rest of Sofia Coppola’s films - The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring - not least because I’d like to see if my supposition that she has the biggest thing for suffering blondes since Hitchcock is actually true. Like seriously. This explains so much about her filmography.

(While we’re covering the Coppola dynasty, I’d also like to see Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. And Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait.)

Other big studio releases: I want to see Pitch Perfect 2 and 3. I’ve already seen the first one (which was directed by a man anyway), which surely means that I’ve gotten past the big vomiting scenes and can now enjoy my all-girls a cappella choir vomit free. Surely? And I’m hoping that the second and third movies have more actual female friendship than the first one. Basically, I’m hoping that the second and third Pitch Perfects are the movies that I hoped the first one would be.

I want to dig deeper into French cinema. More Agnes Varda, of course, any other Agnes Jaoui I can get my hands on, Claire Denis - Beau Travail is supposed to be wonderful - and I’ve had Celine Sciamma’s Water Lilies on my list for years, long before I began this project. Perhaps I’ll keep that one for Pride month?

I didn’t plan ahead for Pride month in 2018 and therefore didn’t manage to watch many LGBT+ movies, but this year could be different! This year I could watch Water Lilies, The Itty Bitty Titty Committee, Appropriate Behavior, Saving Face, Desert Hearts... this might be too ambitious for one month. But there’s always June 2020 if there are any left over.

I also didn’t manage to carve out a Soviet month (it would have to be October, wouldn’t it? Although it could be May for May Day…). Someday I will watch The Ascent!

And then there are so many Bollywood films which I marked and didn’t watch because it’s hard to sell people on “Hey, do you want to spend three hours watching a movie you’ve never heard of?” Even though I didn’t particularly like Happy New Year, I want to give Farah Khan’s other heist movie Tees Maar Khan a try. Also Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife, and Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi (Shan Rukh Khan plays a therapist. I don’t actually seek out SRK movies but he’s in 90% of the Bollywood I watch anyway. Does Bollywood just automatically ship all his movies to the US?), and Zoya Akhtar’s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, which is about three friends on a road trip in Spain. I love road trips!

And… that’s probably enough movies to be getting on with, so I’d better stop there.

In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

1. My dream has always been for someone to draw fanart or write fanfic for one of my original works (I think Briarley would be most amenable at this point, but I’m not picky), so… that. You’ve arrived as an author once your works get their own AO3 category!

2. I’d really like a copy of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman. Although possibly I should gift this one to myself through the magic of interlibrary loan.

3. Prompts! I love writing to prompts - whether fanfic or origfic. asakiyume once gave me a prompt about a time-traveling popcorn ball and she got a whole children’s book out of it (although obviously I’m usually not quite that prolific).