Woolf, Austen, Palin, Abrams, Gaga And Me
Champagne Candy posted this page from the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s handwriting is thin, tight and slanty, somewhat as I imagine the “spidery hand” Tolkien gives to Bilbo Baggins.
The page is one of several in the British Library’s marvelous online manuscript exhibition, which includes drafts by Pope, Blake, Dickens, Wilfred Owens, and this delightful History of England by a sixteen-year-old Jane Austen:
‘The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st. By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian.’
Which brings me to the hopefully subsiding hubbub over Sarah Palin’s memoir. A number of people whose writing and judgment I respect have questioned paying her any attention—shouldn’t we be close-reading the healthcare bill instead; aren’t we only enabling her; and so on. I think we should be close-reading Palin and the healthcare bill. She came within seven million votes of being vice-president, and while it’s unlikely that she’ll gain high national office, inasmuch as her fameball book and tour is a calculated effort—in collusion with the mainstream media she derides—to channel the beliefs of a substantial minority, I’d rather understand what I oppose, and be able to say precisely why she elicits such strong reactions.
Rudolph Delson does just that here and here in two short, sharp, funny and ultimately sad close reads:
[O]n page 242, she recounts her speech to the Republican National Convention, and in particular she recounts her line: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities.” I remember how Palin delivered that line; I remember the derision in her voice; and I remember the pleasure she took in her own derision; she was trying to insult Barack Obama, and she liked herself for having insulted him.
It is breathtaking, then, to hear what she has to say, in Going Rogue, about that particular line of her speech:
Applause erupted again, a shout-out to independent-minded Americans who didn’t look to government for all the answers.
I believe she is saying that small-town mayors are not part of the government, but that community organizers are.
An endorsement from Brian Mihok and an email announcement from iTunes (shiny!) spurred me to at last see last year’s Star Trek reboot. (Yes, the DVD and, God help us, the Blu-Ray, have more features than the iTunes edition, but I’m not about to buy an HD TV for, well, ever, and I’m not enough of a fangirl to fall all over the extras).
The reboot is a good ride. The effort and expense to make a blockbuster niggle at a little Socialist corner of my soul, but as my students might write, blockbusters have been with us since time began… or at least since emperors flooded the Coliseum for mock sea battles.
J.J. Abrams’ fondness for lens flares gives Trek a glassy sheen reminiscent of trying to use a Macbook outdoors. It makes space feel brilliant and liquid instead of dark; like a fluid that can be squeezed around in some kind of lava lamp-ish tube, or sound that can be dialed up or down at will—sensory input as visual effect. But the lighting, and the use of practical locations instead of CG, give the film a pleasing tactile quality that’s in sharp contrast to and a great improvement on the sterility of Star Wars I-III. Abrams and his production staff talk about learning from Star Wars, but the hyperkinetic jitter-cam and swinging pans remind me more of Paul Greengrass, or the better episodes of Battlestar Galactica.
The writing is quite good, for movie writing—which isn’t so much a dig at screenwriters but an acknowledgement of the difference between screen and page. The movie’s villain, the “particularly troubled Romulan,” Nero, and his enormous, spidery ship, materialize out of a black hole in time to destroy the U.S.S. Kelvin and James Kirk’s father. Nero then evidently hangs out in deep space for twenty-five years, waiting for Spock Prime to follow through the black hole (which, of course, Nero can’t be certain will happen… except this is a movie so of course it’s going to happen). In a novel we’d have time to wonder how Nero is a) managing to feed his crew b) not being noticed. The twenty-five years would be a loose thread, begging us to unravel the entire movie.
Why didn’t Abrams have Nero materialize at the last minute, in time to meet New Kirk, New Spock and our good ship Enterprise? That movie would still change enough in the Trek universe to be a “reboot.” But I think Abrams and the writers wanted Kirk to be more different than that—nature vs. nuture: they wanted to him have the same basic genetic makeup, but so different an upbringing (which they wisely show us very little of) as to sever any comparisons with Kirk Prime. Onscreen, they’re able to keep everything so kinetic that we hardly have time to think about it until it’s over.
My one—predictable—quibble: the reboot also reboots the gender stereotyping of the original, and I don’t mean the go-go boots. Uhura is brilliant, sexy and takes no guff… but she also has very little to do. We establish that she’s smart; she puts down Kirk; then she gets out of the way so the guys can take over with the kicking of ass. Maybe it’s expecting too much of a movie whose prime business is re-establishing an existing set of characters—and I wouldn’t want to lose Bruce Greenwood’s Captain Pike—but Battlestar Galactica made Michelle Forbes’ Admiral Cain into a magnetic, plot-driving character outranking even Adama. Surely, in the twenty-third century, among those go-go booted Starfleeters, are some captains and admirals, or officers trained in hand-to-hand combat? But BSG’s writer’s room had a lot of women in it, notably, in Seasons One and Two, the subsequently much-missed Toni Graphia. Watching the behind-the-scenes included with the iTunes edition of Trek I couldn’t help but notice that although the movie was edited by two women, among the producers and crew I saw only men (so, those DVD/iTunes extras do come in handy). I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t realize they were leaving something out.
Friday night after checking up online gossip and watching the latest Avatar trailer, I dreamt about my weekend errands. The dream recognizably took place in our horrible local confabulation of strip malls, late at night, in blinding rain, but instead of driving defensively because of Massachusetts drivers, I was dodging dinosaurs. I went to an ATM, which was more like a FedEx drop than any actual ATM, and when I swung down the door to deposit my check—because it was, after all, a like a FedEx drop—I saw a pile of rain-splattered and smeared checks made out to Lady Gaga, who then ran back into the ATM, drenched and afraid her deposit hadn’t gone through. We talked about avoiding the dinosaurs (best approach: let them pass as they didn’t seem to notice us).
Margaret Talbot wrote about post-Freudian analysis and treatment of dreams in the November 16 New Yorker:
The women in [in a Miamonides Sleep Arts & Sciences center study] wrote down one of their disturbing dreams and were instructed to change it in any way they wished. They then wrote down the altered version in full and were asked to spend between five and twenty minutes a day conjuring the revised dream. At the end of the trial they were given a formal evaluation. Those who had completed the imagery-rehearsal therapy were having significantly fewer disturbing dreams.
I think I’ll start with curtailing bedtime Internets.
