1. Here is what Jan Morris couldn’t have said in Conundrum, perhaps because the culture wasn’t there yet; though her book remains a courageous onNotes
1. Here is what Jan Morris couldn’t have said in Conundrum, perhaps because the culture wasn’t there yet; though her book remains a courageous one.
2. The author describes an explosion of gender dysphoria after a lifetime of suppression of same — and even after that doubts persist. This makes for astonishing reading.
3. Lucy Sante is of my generation, so her allusions to various cultural touchstones are very familiar.
4. Her depictions of her virulently Catholic mother will set your hair on fire.
5. Her review of her crushes on girls and her family’s pathetic dysfunction seems more like tempered evisceration than mere background. Who’s the TMI Frenchman who lays it out warts and all? Lehrer, I think.
Sidney Lumet has been making movies for so long and so well, that his description of the movie-making process is very stripped down — almost aphoristiSidney Lumet has been making movies for so long and so well, that his description of the movie-making process is very stripped down — almost aphoristic. It’s something of a master class.
In his explanation of lenses, he starts:
“Lenses have different feelings about them. Different lenses will tell a story differently.” (p.78)
That’s what I mean by aphoristic.
There are also excellent stories here about how he gets his actors to act. Among them Ingrid Bergman (Murder on the Orient Express), Marlon Brando (The Fugitive Kind), Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), William Holden and Faye Dunaway (Network) and Paul Newman (The Verdict).
The chapter “Shooting the Movie” gave me the best look at day to day movie-making. Especially interesting was the author’s review of the call sheet for two separate days of shooting. Everything is listed here: what sets/locations will be used; what scenes shot — everything is numbered — which actors present; how many pages of script shot (in eighths of a page); time when Teamsters have to pick everyone up, etc.
Published in 1995, this is analog filmmaking. Today some operations, like editing, have been utterly streamlined. The viewing of rushes, too, have changed with the advent of digital technology. Takes are now seen immediately on set. But the logistics of scheduling, rehearsal, blocking, set lighting, location scouting, camera movements, etc. – less of that has changed....more
The magnitude and scope of the tragedy here is astonishing. That's the reason to read it. The science writing after p. 160 or so, increasing as one goThe magnitude and scope of the tragedy here is astonishing. That's the reason to read it. The science writing after p. 160 or so, increasing as one goes deeper, I found the most interesting part of the book. I wish there had been more.
As a stylistic document, it's not impressive. I have been thinking of V.S. Naipaul and Oliver Sacks — each of whom wrote nonfiction with admirable style. You don't get that here. This is a transfer of information, flatly. Moreover, I think the characterizations, to the extent that they exist, are facile.
Imagine you're Catholic, white and married. It's the 1960s and you have twelve children. Slowly, one by one, six of the children — all sons — become schizophrenic. And this in an era when nothing is known about the disease, when there are many theories but little consensus.
As the sons slowly unhinge, the parents — Mimi and Don — repress or deny everything. In many cases they blame it on something else. As when Jim's wife tells them of his psychotic breakdown, and they blame it on trouble in her marriage. The lengths to which the parents will go to evade stigma will set your hair on fire.
Being of a certain age, I can remember exactly where I was while this family was suffering each of its Aeschylean vicissitudes. That alignment gives immediacy to the narrative.
The affected brothers include Donald, Jim, Peter, Brian, Matt and Joe Galvin. Brian, quietly prescribed Navane some time before, suddenly kills himself and his girlfriend with a shotgun in Lodi, California. It's 1973.
These parents spent most of their time in denial. They produced 12 children and were by necessity hands off when it came to upbringing. The boys especially, left to their own devices, went hog wild. The father, Don, was away from the house whenever possible, an absent father. Now he has a stroke.
"Don had always thought that the sick boys ought to leave and get treatment outside the home. 'God helps those who help themselves,' he would say; if the boys were unwilling there was nothing else anyone could do. . . All of Don's old arguments—that Mimi had been babying the boys; that he believed in the school of hard knocks; that those self-help books he gave the boys were all about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—would never work [for Mimi] again. Now that the worst had happened. . . ." (p. 132)
Twelve children with virtually no parental support or network! What were they thinking? They weren't farmers producing workers for agriculture, in which huge families were common. They were middle-class suburbanites. In the end, I found it too long. ...more
"Alice Munro confesses to not having been there for her small children and knowing that they suffered for it. 'When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. ...' " (p. 113)
If this is your subject matter—if you are someone who doesn't want children—this might be a terrific read for you, as it was for me....more
Compelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those deCompelling. Declining birth rates it turns out are not so much about the choices women make as it is about the socioeconomic context in which those decisions are made.
The author writes about how before the American Revolution there was a greater sense of community that made it possible for children to live amid large extended families. This made it easier on biological parents while allowing those with no children a chance to mother.
But we lost this strength largely because of the myth of frontier individualism. We pulled away from community. So caregiving shrank to the size of today's nuclear family. Many today still view the nuclear family as the epitome of family. In truth, the author writes, the nuclear family actually represents a diminishment of the outsize child rearing capacities of far larger, now no longer extant community-based extended families.
With those extended families no longer in existence, the author believes we have to support women by way of government programs. The European Community already does some of these things. The failure of the U.S. Congress to extend the Child Tax Credit is a good example of our own national failure to do so.
"The child tax credit (CTC) was a monthly payment of $250 or $300 per child that was given to eligible families in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. . . According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021, reducing the child poverty rate from 9.7% to 5.2%. . . [Conversely] without the CTC [when Congress failed to renew it] the child poverty rate rose sharply to 12.4% in 2022, an increase of 41% from December 2021 to January 2022. This means that 3.7 million more children fell below the poverty line." (Source: Conversation with Bing, 1/10/2024)
Add to this example our lack of daycare, Medicare cuts, food stamp cuts, school lunch programs cuts, afterschool programs cuts, etc. — and you begin to glimpse why the decision not to have children is being made by so many women. I pulled the following quote from today's NYT: "Note that more than eight million children will be left out of a new federal food assistance program for needy families . . . because they live in one of the 15 states [whose] governors . . . refuse to participate."
There is simply no support system such as existed when large, extended families were prominent. Right now we have only NGOs or states to provide relief. But as the author says.
"Over the past two centuries . . . we jettisoned expansive ideas of kinship, isolated parents, disinvested from communities, and replaced community care with a kind of care that individuals have to pay for. . . . [But] that's not to say we couldn't rebuild systems of community support if we wanted to, or that we lack examples of how we might do it." (p. 70)...more
It's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic countIt's good to know something of Mahayana Buddhists' worldview. Turns out their afterlife is far more phantasmagoric than that of its monotheistic counterparts. Like the latter's soul though, the Mahayana Buddhists believe in a form of post-death consciousness called mind. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has been available to me for years, but I've never made sense of it. As usual, author Chödrön distills the complexity down to a few cogent chapters. That's a gift I prize. I think Chödrön's best text for those new to Buddhism is Start Where You Are. Let me also suggest Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind....more
The book is a gold mine for readers who know something about humanism but may not have grasped its historical development. It has the feel of an excellent graduate seminar. Bakewell exlores the fuzzy concept of "humanism" from late Middle Ages to the present by telling us of its history and proponents.
So the book points you toward others you might not have thought to read. Moreover, books like this are interstitial reads. They help you to tie together seemingly disparate bits of information gleaned from other readings into a more or less coherent whole. This time the focus is humanism. Fascinating....more
I haven't read much of Morris, it's true, but in this book it is mostly descriptions of cityscapes, neighborhoods, gardens and such. The author never I haven't read much of Morris, it's true, but in this book it is mostly descriptions of cityscapes, neighborhoods, gardens and such. The author never introduces characters for local color. I mean living characters, not historical figures. Of the latter there are plenty: Maximilian I, Baron Pasquale Revoltella, Casanova, James Joyce, etc. This is not to say I'm not enjoying the book. The best parts are when she delves into the city's history: as the Austro-Hungarian empire's sole deep-water port, its post World War I transfer to Italy, etc. Or it's peculiar geographic location, shoehorned in among Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia and the rest of Italy. She's a nimble writer. She started as a reporter and was the only journalist to accompany the first successful expedition to Mount Everest in 1953. An early multivolume work was her Pax Britannica Trilogy. So there's a uninformed temptation to think of her mostly as a historian; moreover, one who somewhat aggrandizes empire....more
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