When you secure yourself a table at the sunlight-flooded coffee shop at Borders, overlooking the modest spire of the Northern Suburban Church and the uninspiring mien of Stein Mart, trying to find a little corner of peace on this summer-adjacent Saturday on which you have been stood up by not one, but two men, to ruminate about how it was thus, Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” is the last book you should choose to read.
You were perhaps going for sombre. What you end up is being this bundle of unholy mirth and almost toppling over in the effort to laugh silently so as not to make a spectacle of yourself.
I like Bill Bryson. I found his “Short History of Nearly Everything” the kind of science book I wished I had in school (he explains Avagadro number as the number of popcorn kernels required to cover all of US nine miles deep!). His “Made in America,” a densely packed account of American history examined through a linguistics prism, was unputdownable. I love his breezy style, his ironic sense of humor, and fascination with things that are slightly quirky.
But “Notes from...” is quite simply the funniest. It is a travelogue and a loving adieu of an anglophile to an island that was his home for two decades. He meanders through towns and cities and unheard of hamlets, trying to locate the soul of the country. It is unhurried, observant, and makes affectionate jokes about everything.
His fascination with the British names of places inspires a slew that sound syntactically correct but obviously tongue-in-cheek: Little Puking, Buggered Ploughman, Ram’s Dropping, and Great Shagging. He describes an obscure castle in Corfe as “everyone’s favorite ruins after Princess Margaret.” He gets positively Mark Twain-sh about the kind of stories he used to handle as a sub-editor of Bournemouth Evening Echo: “Mrs Evelyn Stubbs honored the assembled guests with a fascinating and amusing talk on her recent hysterectomy,” and “Mrs Throop was unable to give her planned talk on dog management because of her recent tragic mauling by her mastiff, Prince, but Mrs Smethwick gamely stepped into the breach with an hilarious account of her experiences as a freelance funeral organist.”
My favorite lines so far are how he picks up the flowery language of a certain restaurant’s menu: “I asked him (the waiter) for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came around with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondelle of blanched wheat, oven baked and masked in a poppy-seed coating... I dressed the table top with a small circlet of copper specie crafted at the Royal Mint and, suppressing a small eruction of gastrointestinal air, effected my egress.”
It is the kind of travel writing that you never want to end because it is like having a vicarious vacation, especially in a country that has become so much part of our post colonialist consciousness.
Which puts in mind another probably obscure travelogue of the UK written by Helene Hanff. Most people haven’t heard of her, but she is famous for her humorous epistolary novel called “84 Charing Cross Road,” an account of her 20-year correspondence with the Frank Doel, Chief Buyer of Mark & Co., a mail-order book store in London. By her account, she seemed to have been a poor writer living in an unheated brownstone in NYC, and could never afford to travel to England. Eventually, Reader’s Digest sponsored a trip in 1971. She couldn’t meet Frank, as he had died a year earlier and the store had closed, and her travelogue is a bittersweet, shy yet passionate ode to UK. It is called “The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.” I cried when she wrote how moved she was when she visited the pub patronized by Shakespeare, touching the walls with the wonder of being there.
It’s been a pleasant weekend weather wise. Mercury has been climbing boldly, and hit 86 deg F today. I formally set the thermostat in my room from “heat” to “cool.” The pool at the hotel has been opened and our first batch of bikini-clad PYTs were out. I too have decided to go slinky this summer. I did my first summer wardrobe shopping and treated myself to a pair of Calvin Klein trousers. There is something life assuring about spending a bomb on big brands.
Summer also means summer release movies. I kicked it off by watching “Shrek Forever After” in 3D. It is definitely darker than its predecessors. It is an ogre-dom version of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it looks like you don’t need imminent financial ruin and an unraveling of everything you believed in your life to bring on a crisis anymore. All it takes is one year of fatherhood and a place in the mainstream for our Metrosexual ogre to long for the pre-commitment days of terrorizing villagers. And since he is an ogre, it is only natural that he will have a meltdown at his kids’ first-birthday party and walk out, leaving his wife to handle the boring family details. Nice, papa!
(On an aside: I do wish people will leave that old classic alone. It seems it is unremakable. Have you watched that travesty of a remake called “Family Man” starring Nick Cage? Hell, he doesn’t even have a crisis there. His Gordon Gecko-ish existence as a Wall Street millionaire is visited by the ghost-of-all-Christamases-rolled-into-one-black-stereotype Don Cheadle just like that. And then the narrative gets into the “Idiot America” territory--in the alter-life, our hero is a used-tire sales man because he didn’t dump his girlfriend to go and study in UK, and ultimately realizes that in a universe of binary choices, it is better to be dissatisfied and frustrated but WITH family instead of being a millionaire. Really.)
Coming back to Shrek, if you don’t mind our beloved hero’s immaturity, then the movie moves fast and strong. I liked it that they have created dystopic Far Far Away, with stark, desolate landscapes, and an underground movement. The supporting characters are all, as usual, heartwarming and funny. You should see Eddy Murphy belting out songs including “Papa don’t preach” as the official radio of the witches’ carriage. Puss is too fat now to get into his boots, but he still has the eyes. What I liked most was the number of ways they have used the broom--I especially loved the way they have been used as enemy fighter planes. In 3D, it all looks fabulous.
But there is a paucity of the sly jokes that the first two editions (even the third for that matter) were filled with. You can hear the clink of the spatula as it hits the bottom of the creativity pot when they use that old Carpenter’s chestnut of “I’m on top of the world” for a musical montage of Shrek’s newfound freedom. Seriously? I know nothing of music, but even I found that song eweth! It is good that this is going to be the last outing of the franchise. Watch it as it definitely has a sentimental subtext.
I shall end this long article with many digressions with an account of a very unusual movie I watched called Mulholand Drive. Directed by David Lynch, this weird little thriller is a combination of film noir in color (what a delightful notion) and a study of surreal expressionism. Roshomon-like, it deals with multiple versions of reality, but unlike Roshomon, the lines between dreamscape and reality blur, with unexplained meanderings and stops now and then.
But who cares about the content--this is a triumph of form where the camera moves with the characters, where street corners and doorways are menacing because you don’t know what lurks beyond, and the camera never explains because it stops when the character stops. It hangs hesitantly behind a supine body, too scared to walk around to see its face. It turns and sees people who are not there the next moment.
Naomi Watts as one of the two female protagonists is brilliant. Laura Herring is voluptuous and mysterious. For the sake of certain sections of my readership, I have to say that the movie has two very sexy lesbian scenes--so sexy that it seems European. There is a performance of a lament song called “Llorando (Crying)” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIpkMg9sh6Q&feature=related) in the middle of the movie which is the most chilling song and scene I have ever heard/seen.
The movie requires a little mental contortion to understand, but God, what an experience!
You were perhaps going for sombre. What you end up is being this bundle of unholy mirth and almost toppling over in the effort to laugh silently so as not to make a spectacle of yourself.
I like Bill Bryson. I found his “Short History of Nearly Everything” the kind of science book I wished I had in school (he explains Avagadro number as the number of popcorn kernels required to cover all of US nine miles deep!). His “Made in America,” a densely packed account of American history examined through a linguistics prism, was unputdownable. I love his breezy style, his ironic sense of humor, and fascination with things that are slightly quirky.
But “Notes from...” is quite simply the funniest. It is a travelogue and a loving adieu of an anglophile to an island that was his home for two decades. He meanders through towns and cities and unheard of hamlets, trying to locate the soul of the country. It is unhurried, observant, and makes affectionate jokes about everything.
His fascination with the British names of places inspires a slew that sound syntactically correct but obviously tongue-in-cheek: Little Puking, Buggered Ploughman, Ram’s Dropping, and Great Shagging. He describes an obscure castle in Corfe as “everyone’s favorite ruins after Princess Margaret.” He gets positively Mark Twain-sh about the kind of stories he used to handle as a sub-editor of Bournemouth Evening Echo: “Mrs Evelyn Stubbs honored the assembled guests with a fascinating and amusing talk on her recent hysterectomy,” and “Mrs Throop was unable to give her planned talk on dog management because of her recent tragic mauling by her mastiff, Prince, but Mrs Smethwick gamely stepped into the breach with an hilarious account of her experiences as a freelance funeral organist.”
My favorite lines so far are how he picks up the flowery language of a certain restaurant’s menu: “I asked him (the waiter) for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came around with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondelle of blanched wheat, oven baked and masked in a poppy-seed coating... I dressed the table top with a small circlet of copper specie crafted at the Royal Mint and, suppressing a small eruction of gastrointestinal air, effected my egress.”
It is the kind of travel writing that you never want to end because it is like having a vicarious vacation, especially in a country that has become so much part of our post colonialist consciousness.
Which puts in mind another probably obscure travelogue of the UK written by Helene Hanff. Most people haven’t heard of her, but she is famous for her humorous epistolary novel called “84 Charing Cross Road,” an account of her 20-year correspondence with the Frank Doel, Chief Buyer of Mark & Co., a mail-order book store in London. By her account, she seemed to have been a poor writer living in an unheated brownstone in NYC, and could never afford to travel to England. Eventually, Reader’s Digest sponsored a trip in 1971. She couldn’t meet Frank, as he had died a year earlier and the store had closed, and her travelogue is a bittersweet, shy yet passionate ode to UK. It is called “The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.” I cried when she wrote how moved she was when she visited the pub patronized by Shakespeare, touching the walls with the wonder of being there.
It’s been a pleasant weekend weather wise. Mercury has been climbing boldly, and hit 86 deg F today. I formally set the thermostat in my room from “heat” to “cool.” The pool at the hotel has been opened and our first batch of bikini-clad PYTs were out. I too have decided to go slinky this summer. I did my first summer wardrobe shopping and treated myself to a pair of Calvin Klein trousers. There is something life assuring about spending a bomb on big brands.
Summer also means summer release movies. I kicked it off by watching “Shrek Forever After” in 3D. It is definitely darker than its predecessors. It is an ogre-dom version of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it looks like you don’t need imminent financial ruin and an unraveling of everything you believed in your life to bring on a crisis anymore. All it takes is one year of fatherhood and a place in the mainstream for our Metrosexual ogre to long for the pre-commitment days of terrorizing villagers. And since he is an ogre, it is only natural that he will have a meltdown at his kids’ first-birthday party and walk out, leaving his wife to handle the boring family details. Nice, papa!
(On an aside: I do wish people will leave that old classic alone. It seems it is unremakable. Have you watched that travesty of a remake called “Family Man” starring Nick Cage? Hell, he doesn’t even have a crisis there. His Gordon Gecko-ish existence as a Wall Street millionaire is visited by the ghost-of-all-Christamases-rolled-into-one-black-stereotype Don Cheadle just like that. And then the narrative gets into the “Idiot America” territory--in the alter-life, our hero is a used-tire sales man because he didn’t dump his girlfriend to go and study in UK, and ultimately realizes that in a universe of binary choices, it is better to be dissatisfied and frustrated but WITH family instead of being a millionaire. Really.)
Coming back to Shrek, if you don’t mind our beloved hero’s immaturity, then the movie moves fast and strong. I liked it that they have created dystopic Far Far Away, with stark, desolate landscapes, and an underground movement. The supporting characters are all, as usual, heartwarming and funny. You should see Eddy Murphy belting out songs including “Papa don’t preach” as the official radio of the witches’ carriage. Puss is too fat now to get into his boots, but he still has the eyes. What I liked most was the number of ways they have used the broom--I especially loved the way they have been used as enemy fighter planes. In 3D, it all looks fabulous.
But there is a paucity of the sly jokes that the first two editions (even the third for that matter) were filled with. You can hear the clink of the spatula as it hits the bottom of the creativity pot when they use that old Carpenter’s chestnut of “I’m on top of the world” for a musical montage of Shrek’s newfound freedom. Seriously? I know nothing of music, but even I found that song eweth! It is good that this is going to be the last outing of the franchise. Watch it as it definitely has a sentimental subtext.
I shall end this long article with many digressions with an account of a very unusual movie I watched called Mulholand Drive. Directed by David Lynch, this weird little thriller is a combination of film noir in color (what a delightful notion) and a study of surreal expressionism. Roshomon-like, it deals with multiple versions of reality, but unlike Roshomon, the lines between dreamscape and reality blur, with unexplained meanderings and stops now and then.
But who cares about the content--this is a triumph of form where the camera moves with the characters, where street corners and doorways are menacing because you don’t know what lurks beyond, and the camera never explains because it stops when the character stops. It hangs hesitantly behind a supine body, too scared to walk around to see its face. It turns and sees people who are not there the next moment.
Naomi Watts as one of the two female protagonists is brilliant. Laura Herring is voluptuous and mysterious. For the sake of certain sections of my readership, I have to say that the movie has two very sexy lesbian scenes--so sexy that it seems European. There is a performance of a lament song called “Llorando (Crying)” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIpkMg9sh6Q&feature=related) in the middle of the movie which is the most chilling song and scene I have ever heard/seen.
The movie requires a little mental contortion to understand, but God, what an experience!
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