reading | dual personalities

February 26, 2018

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”*

by chuckofish

After raining all week, it rained all day Saturday and our front yard was literally a lake. On Sunday morning, however, a great bright orb appeared in the sky, and proceeded to dry everything up. It was nice to see the sun after such a long time. Of course, there are now signs of spring everywhere.

But we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves.

I re-read The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry. It is a very short novell(a) about Charles Goodnight, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Buffalo Bill, various women and Indians. McMurtry is long past his Lonesome Dove powers, but there is something about his books that soothes my soul. When I finished that, I started Goodbye My Lovely by my hero, Raymond Chandler. I have a whole pile of current novels to read, but I just can’t seem to want to read them.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave my Valentine the DVD set of the three Godfather movies, because it had occurred to me that I had never actually seen The Godfather (1972) in its entirety. We watched it Saturday night. I remember when my parents went to see it. (I was deemed too young.) They didn’t love it, but they were somewhat impressed I think. It was new and different and shocking for the time.

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It holds up after all these years, but I can’t say I loved it or anything. I guess I just do not understand gangster movies or their appeal. They are about criminals, violent sick criminals. With whom am I supposed to identify? Much less care about? The OM says their appeal has to do with people’s vicarious desire to kill/do violence to their enemies without consequences. Really? Yikes. And why did Marlon Brando win an Oscar for that role? If anyone deserved an Oscar it was Al Pacino who was the center of the film. He is really good–you can follow the arc of his character, how he changes, how his eyes deaden, how he becomes a criminal. [According to IMDB, Pacino did not attend the Oscar ceremony in protest of perceived category fraud. As his performance reflected greater screen time than that of his co-star Marlon Brando, Pacino believed he should have received a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Well, welcome to Hollywood, Al. You were robbed.] The movie has a very good cast–James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton. Well, now I’ve seen it.

I went to church on Sunday–rite I for Lent–and enjoyed the service except for an overabundance of virtue-signaling in the sermon by our associate rector. Saints preserve me. The ushers were also annoyingly loud out in the narthex during the sermon, and I was seriously contemplating going out to tell them to please shut the heck up, but was saved from having to do so when my friend Carla got up and went and did it first! You go, girl. We all know that guys want to usher so they don’t have to sit through the service, but gabbing in the narthex is not okay.

While I was sitting in church during this penitential season, I couldn’t help but think some more about The Godfather, especially the sickening baptism scene, the climax of the film. You remember: while the baptism of Michael Corleone’s goddaughter is being enacted in some ornate Catholic church, the elaborate murders of the heads of the five New York mafia families are simultaneously going on, orchestrated by Michael. In essence, he is being baptized twice: once as he renews his own baptismal vows, and secondly as he is “baptized” into organized crime as the new don.

This is all very well and brilliant film-making, blah, blah, blah, oh the irony. But no thank you. Just not my cup of tea I guess.

When I got home from church, I convinced the OM to take a drive down to Ted Drewes–our first of the year.

My mocha concrete hit the spot. The OM did a little advertising for the boy.

I spent quite some time washing some more 30-year old toys I unearthed, but sadly, the wee babes didn’t come over as planned–sad face–so I don’t have any cute pictures. C’est la vie. We roll with the punches.

So it’s back to the salt mine today. Have a good Monday.

*Clemenza in The Godfather

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December 7, 2017

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”*

by chuckofish

“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

–Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Today we toast Willa Cather (1873-1947), whom we love, on her birthday.

The painting is “High Plains — Range Land,” an oil on linen painting by Raymond J. Eastwood.

*William Wordsworth

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November 29, 2017

What are you reading?

by chuckofish

I am reading a bunch of different things.

You will recall that My Friend Flicka, written by Wyomingite Mary O’Hara, was mentioned a couple of times in a Longmire mystery…so I felt I should read it since I never have. Written in 1941, it tells the story of Ken McLaughlin, the son of a a Wyoming rancher, and his horse Flicka. It was the first in a trilogy, followed by Thunderhead (1943) and Green Grass of Wyoming (1946). The popular 1943 film version featured young Roddy McDowell.

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They re-made Flicka in 2006 with a girl protagonist (of course) and Tim McGraw as the father. Oy.

Anyway, the book is very well-written and quite sophisticated for a young adult novel of that era–there is a graphic scene of yearlings being gelded which I could have lived without. Furthermore, Ken’s mother is a Bryn Mawr graduate and they are Episcopalians! But I’m just not that interested in horses, I guess, because I’m not sure I will trudge on to the end.

I am also re-reading Mere Christianity, which–no surprise–is really good!

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

When I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, I read Jan Karon. So now I am reading These High, Green Hills.

Lunch at the Grill, thought Father Tim, was what kept life real. He had to confess, however, that he could hardly wait to get back to the office and finish the C.S. Lewis essay entitled “Thought, Imagination, Language.”

I also recently re-read The Free Man by Conrad Richter. It tells the story of Henry Free, a hard-working Palatine German who comes to farm in Pennsylvania but is tricked, along with many of his countrymen, by the British, and is sold as an indentured servant when he arrives in America. He escapes and thrives and eventually fights for liberty on the battlefields of the Revolution. The book did not receive good reviews when it was published in 1943 during the height of WWII. I am not surprised, since the British–our allies!–are the bad guys. It must have been shocking and somewhat distasteful at the time. The lesson here is an important one though–the British are not always the good guys and the Germans not always the villains.

I admire Richter and his spare, but beautiful writing a lot. He is an all-but-forgotten writer these days, but I read that they are re-making the Awakening Land trilogy for television. Frances McDormand is going to play Sayward Luckett, the main character, which could be good or bad. Perhaps it will encourage someone to go back and read the books.

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