dual personalities

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September 4, 2018

Postcards from a long weekend

by chuckofish

Daughter #1 breezed in on Friday night and stayed until Monday morning–such a treat! Per Friday’s blogpost, we watched The Odd Couple and enjoyed it thoroughly. Later in the weekend we watched McClintock! (1963) which I had not seen in forever, due to it usually only being available in terrible pirated form. But you can see it on Amazon Prime now in all its widescreen glory and it is worth it. One of the top-grossing films of 1963, it is John Wayne as John Wayne surrounded by familiar faces. Everyone has a lot of fun and there is a fight in a mud pit. Maureen O’Hara is on hand to be willful and stubborn and ultimately she gets spanked (as does Stephanie Powers on an earlier occasion) and everyone cheers.

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We also did some estate sale-ing…

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Needlepoint rescue of the week

…and local shopping and had lunch at the Women’s Exchange. We searched the house for some lost counted cross-stitch pattern books and never found what we were looking for, but we unearthed a few gems. We also made a spontaneous trip to the STL Zoo to see the new-ish bear pits. It was probably not a great idea considering it was the Labor Day weekend, but we battled the crowds and found a place to park (a mile away) and visited said pits. Sorry, I don’t have a picture of the new Grizzly bears. They were large and scary, but not as scary as the polar bear who is huge…

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We rode our beloved zoo train around…

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and even took an obligatory selfie…which I will not share because it is truly heinous.

The wee babes and their parents came over on Sunday and even though they were sniffly and a bit under-the-weather, they ran us ragged.

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Lottie loves this little chair…

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…but the stairs are just the right size for sitting and thinking and taking a moment…

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(I wasn’t kidding about the runny nose)

The OM stayed out of the fray per usual…

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And we did have a dance party!

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Dance Party!

After daughter #1 went home to COMO, I did laundry and picked up the house and caught up on the phone with daughter #2 and ordered my Christmas cards online. Don’t kid yourself–it’ll be here before we know it!

Today I am back at the salt mine for a busy and stressful week. I’m taking it one day at a time.

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September 3, 2018

“A pyramid of cans in the pale moonlight”*

by chuckofish

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Hope you all are enjoying your Labor Day holiday with dance parties and the like. The wee babes had runny noses last night so they were slowed down enough for us to keep up. The wee laddie does enjoy burning down the house, as you know, and little Lottie knows the best thing about being a woman/Is the prerogative to have a little fun. 

Make good choices! (I’ll have more tomorrow.)

*”Chattahoochee” by Jim McBride/Alan Jackson

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September 1, 2018

You’ll find your fortune falling all over the town*

by chuckofish

Well, I tiptoed through the first week of classes without disturbing anyone’s lingering summer reverie. I kept up with my paperwork and even managed to read Amor Towles’ The Rules of Civility, a witty and sometimes sad trip to 1938 Manhatten, in which Katey, our female protagonist, attempts to secure a place among society’s movers and shakers.

1938 Vogue cover

The book was hard to put down, and I hated to see it end. If you want a plot summary, you can read the NYT review , though in my view the article is pretty superficial. Suffice it to say that Towles writes lovingly of his fully realized characters. The Rules of Civility is not the too clever, too knowing depiction of despicable rich people that we have come to expect from modern literature.

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There are no real villains in this book, only imperfect but fundamentally decent people making their way in the world. That some of them are rich and privileged does not prevent them from having character or depth. How refreshing.

Like his second book, A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles’s first novel offers both insight into human nature and plenty of good advice. Take, for example, this passage in which our heroine reminisces about what her father told her as as he lay dying:

“Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice. Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”

Yep, it’s those simple pleasures that really make life worth living. Remember that! One also has to love a heroine who reacts this way to her first experience target-shooting (another of life’s simple pleasures!):

“If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.”

1937 skeet shooting champion — looks as if she’s been shooting all her life.

And this passage reminded me of another dear Katie…

“Katey’s the hottest bookworm you’ll ever meet. If you took all the books that she’s read and piled them in a stack, you could climb to the Milky Way.”

1930s BLOND WOMAN SITTING BY WINDOW READING MAGAZINE PROFILE VIEW PLANTS IN BACKGROUND WINDOW SEAT

Oh, yes. There’s nothing quite like a good book to boost morale when the turkeys are getting you down. Try Amor Towles — you won’t regret it.

 

*Johnny Burke, “Pennies from Heaven”

3 Comments
August 31, 2018

“Don’t point that finger at me unless you intend to use it.”*

by chuckofish

Woohoo, three-day weekend coming up!

I have no Big Plans but daughter #1 will be driving in from mid-MO.

We’ll barbecue, because…

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Maybe we’ll have a dance party…hopefully with the wee babes!

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No doubt we’ll watch a movie…

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Maybe we should watch a Neil Simon movie and toast him since he died this week at 91. The Odd Couple (1968) is always a solid choice and funnier than you remember.

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I can’t take it anymore, Felix, I’m cracking up. Everything you do irritates me. And when you’re not here, the things I know you’re gonna do when you come in irritate me. You leave me little notes on my pillow. Told you 158 times I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. “We’re all out of cornflakes. F.U.” Took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Ungar!

Murder By Death (1976) is also quite funny–a satire of all those Agatha Christie-type mysteries featuring all the famous detectives you can think of. As I recall, David Niven and Maggie Smith steal the show as “Dick and Dora Charleston”.

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We can all relate to Truman Capote’s character, Lionel Twain, when he says:

You’ve tricked and fooled your readers for years. You’ve tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You’ve introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You’ve withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now, the tables are turned. Millions of angry mystery readers are now getting their revenge. When the world learns I’ve outsmarted you, they’ll be selling your $1.95 books for twelve cents.

[Here’s an interesting article about Neil Simon and his influence on American society.]

Well, whatever you choose to do this long weekend, I hope you have a good one! Take a real break from your work and remember:

When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

*Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple

5 Comments
August 30, 2018

The camp-fires of the past

by chuckofish

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A soft veil dims the tender skies,
And half conceals from pensive eyes
The bronzing tokens of the fall;
A calmness broods upon the hills,
And summer’s parting dream distills
A charm of silence over all.The stacks of corn, in brown array,
Stand waiting through the placid day,
Like tattered wigwams on the plain;
The tribes that find a shelter there
Are phantom peoples, forms of air,
And ghosts of vanished joy and pain.

At evening when the crimson crest
Of sunset passes down the West,
I hear the whispering host returning;
On far-off fields, by elm and oak,
I see the lights, I smell the smoke,–
The Camp-fires of the Past are burning.

–“Indian Summer” by Henry Van Dyke

The painting is “Summer in the Blue Ridge” by Hugh Bolton Jones. Hugh Bolton Jones (1848-1927) was an American landscape painter. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he received his early training as an artist. While studying in New York he was strongly influenced by Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River School.

2 Comments
August 29, 2018

How I spent my summer

by chuckofish

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Can it be true? Are we really in the last week of August, the home stretch of summer? Say it ain’t so! Well, I can really relate to Sally, can’t you?

I read some good books (but no Tolstoy) and, although I watched no game shows, I watched a lot of old movies.

PpT1TDw.gifI went to quite a few estate sales.

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We finished our kitchen “update,” but did not make much progress in our basement clean-up. (This project moves to the fall list.)

We went to one baseball game.

We barbecued quite a few times and watched the wee babes get bigger.

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We enjoyed visits from two nephews, one niece, one BFF, two darling daughters, and DN.

I voted in the primary.

I took 5 days of vacation and got out of town, but the rest of the time, I was working! Contrary to popular belief, we do not slow down in the summer.

Pretty lame maybe, but pretty great too, if you ask me.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. (Philippians 4:1)

4 Comments
August 28, 2018

#Momhasanopinion

by chuckofish

I really hate reviews like the one of the re-make of Papillon in the Wall Street Journal where the reviewer manages to insult the current actor (Charlie Hunnam) and the original one (Steve McQueen) both without really knowing what he’s talking about.

Steve McQueen…was among the last of a species cultivated by classic Hollywood, an icon of cool and a performer who enjoyed an ineffable on-screen charisma that translated into an intimacy with his audience—they were all in on this joke called movies…McQueen was the furthest thing from a Method actor. In fact, he wasn’t even considered a great performer…But his particular kind of stardom made it possible to actually enjoy something like “Papillon,” with its bleakness and violence, its constant reversals of fortune, and the injustice at its center.

As if it was his “particular kind of stardom” that made him good, made him watchable. As if the system did it. The system was long gone when McQueen came to town.

Anyway, someone in Hollywood got the bright idea that Charlie Hunnam could be the new Steve McQueen, and they do have some things in common: handsome blond looks and the ability to ride a motorcycle. But it is a disservice to Hunnam, whom I really like, because let’s face it, there is no one like Steve. Let Charlie be Charlie.

Screen Shot 2018-08-27 at 5.31.02 PMRe-making Steve McQueen movies is like like trying to re-make John Wayne movies. It is a Bad Idea.

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But what really triggers me is when reviewers label Steve as the “King of Cool” as if that was something he tried to do. He just was cool, something those nerds don’t have a clue about. Hollywood didn’t make him cool. And, hey, he was a good actor! “In fact, he wasn’t even considered a great performer”–give me a break.

We know better.

Few things trigger me, but, as my children know, this is one of them.

8 Comments
August 27, 2018

“There’s so much to be grateful for, words are poor things.”*

by chuckofish

Monday again and daughter #2 and DN are heading home to Maryland. The long weekend rushed by  as usual.

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We had fun toasting our smart cookie with friends and family.

We also had fun visiting her wonderful wedding venue…

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and there was a whole lot of good instagramming going on…

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A good time was had by all (to say the least)! Everyone was home together. What could be better?

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Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who settest the solitary in families: We commend to thy continual care the homes in which thy people dwell. Put far from them, we beseech thee, every root of bitterness, the desire of vainglory, and the pride of life. Fill them with faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness. Knit together in constant affection those who, in holy wedlock, have been made one flesh. Turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the parents; and so enkindle fervent charity among us all, that we may evermore be kindly affectioned one to another; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP)

*Marilynne Robinson, Home

5 Comments
August 25, 2018

Back to school

by chuckofish

Well, it’s back to school on Monday and I confess that the prospect of all that grading fills me with ennui.

Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming Out of School; Tate. I can’t help feeling that this should be about going into school — it’s glum enough.

I turned to my old college papers for inspiration and they did not disappoint.

Consider, for example, this excerpt from the lengthy comment pictured above, on the left:

You have problems of organization, diction and style. Mainly, you repeat the same words and phrases both in the same paragraph and in different parts of the paper. One gets the sense of going around in circles, like a dog looking for a place to sit, as one tries to follow the progression of your argument….The sooner you learn to write a paper, the better off you’ll be and the easier the next three years will be.

Or take this gem from a first semester freshman year English paper:

Nowadays it’s hard to imagine how a student would react to such comments, although back in the late ’70s I took the criticism reasonably well, in the first case because I knew that I had written a bad paper (the 8th poem of Catullus did not inspire) and in the second because I loved and respected the professor. My main problem was that I had not yet developed the habits of good paper writing: (1) master the material; (2) plan thoroughly, and (3) revise, revise, revise. Gradually, through hard work and careful attention to professors’ comments, I taught myself how to write a paper. My efforts paid off and my grades improved dramatically. I still apply what I learned in college about writing, but much remains for me to learn. Despite being an old lady, I keep trying to improve because I find the struggle satisfying.

What if my professors had not been so forthright? We laugh when we see things like this,

because we find them outrageous, but is being honest really so bad? While there’s no excuse for cruelty, maybe our children/students would be better prepared to face life if we spent less time preserving their feelings and more time showing them how to fix their mistakes.

Just some pre-semester thoughts. Have a delightful weekend and edit carefully!

8 Comments
August 24, 2018

Rolling into the weekend

by chuckofish

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Cheers to drinking lunchtime margaritas on the Amigo’s deck in August. Unheard of, but that’s what we did yesterday. We walked around the neighborhood and hung out with the wee babes and their parents for a little bit. Then we ate homemade mac ‘n cheese and watched The Big Sleep (1946) which DN had never seen.

Kind of a perfect day.

Daughter #2 and DN are driving down to Columbia (in the rain) to spend the day with daughter #1 today, so I am back at the salt mine. But it’s Friday and the weekend beckons…and we’re having a celebratory party for our new PhD on Saturday.

Have a good weekend!

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