Friday, May 31, 2019

Authors as Movie Stars?

“Let’s make a thrilling (suspenseful, joyous , touching) movie based on a famous writer’s life,” said no Hollywood executive ever. As least I don’t think so. Movies require action and while there are writers who lived action-packed lives, most don’t. The truth is, what makes a writer’s life interesting and exciting It is what goes on at the desk and ends up in covers. Pretty boring to watch.

This not-at-all original comment is inspired by the fact that I recently watched several movies, by coincidence, about famous writers, and have at least two more coming up. To my surprise, I enjoyed them too. They were fun on the screen and made with some imagination.

Most recently viewed was The Man Who Invented Christmas. It’s the story (or a story, anyway) of the writing of A Christmas Carol. Dan Stevens plays the youngish Charles Dickens, struggling to come up with a hit after a few unsuccessful books. Jonathan Pryce as Charles father, the embodiment of a character from a different Dickens novel, and a few other real people, like Thackeray, appear briefly.

We see Dickens in his very full family and social life, and also struggling with some devastating memories, struggling to find the next story, struggling to get the names just right, struggling to get the beginning right. Some familiar bits start to appear. And then Mr. Scrooge shows up in his study. In person.

While most of us have never had a character appear, fully formed, looking and sounding like Christopher Plummer (then again, most of us are not Dickens), the movie was a charming and amusing depiction of the writing process. Yes, it is sort of like that. It’s not exactly a spoiler to add that once Dickens got started, he miraculously wrote it white-hot and published it in record time for Christmas sales. It was a great success.

Good-Bye Christopher Robin used a somewhat similar approach, and it too is charming, but fundamentally, accurately, sad. There was a real Christopher Robin, he was A.A. Milne’s son, and he had a bear. His father’s inspired books and the beloved illustrations of E.H. Shepherd, made them, and him, famous and did not provide him with a happy childhood. Far from it. At the same time, the story of how they began, and why they became so beloved, is told by combining live action and animation. There are moments of real loveliness bringing to life the way stories do come to life for children.

Colette is the exception to everything I just wrote. Her life would have been entertaining just as a period drama, but still, it was the books she wrote that made it matter. This is not a movie about where the stories came from; it is about where the writer came from, as the provincial but interesting girl turns into a woman in charge of her own life.

An older movie, Saving Mr. Banks is quite different.I was fascinated enough to write a blog about it for a now closed group blog I belonged to. (You might find it here: http://www.womenofmystery.net/2014/06/28/place-holder-2/) It is the story of P. L. Travers , author of the beloved Mary Poppins books, and her intense disagreements with the Disney studio over the beloved Mary Poppins musical. So far, so good. It really happened and the characters are pretty accurate. However, the story is – um – the Disney version in more ways than one. My old blog post concluded: “Best for us to enjoy the Mary Poppins books, enjoy the Mary Poppins movie and enjoy Saving Mr. Banks while recognizing that they are, mostly, separate works of powerful imaginations.”

To watch next? All Is True, a tale of Shakespeare at the end of his life, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, who has starred and directed in acclaimed films of some of the plays. This will be interesting. There isn’t a lot known about Shakespeare’s late life, or, indeed, any part of his life, and I am curious to see how Branagh imagines that setting into persuasive life. If anyone can to it, I think he can.

Finally, there is the just released Tolkien. I’ve read a full biography and seen the current detailed exhibit on his life at the Morgan Library and Museum. He would seem to be the quintessential author who could never have a movie bio because, after his tragic childhood and service in World War I, nothing happened! He married his first sweetheart, had children and spent the rest of his life as professor of Anglo-Saxon, linguistics and literature. Oh, and he wrote some memorable books. Was the first quarter of his long life enough to make a movie?

And it was made without the approval of his estate. Might it give us a glimpse of a great imagination just getting started? Or be literary gossip, fun perhaps but not meaningful? Or be charming but with little relationship to the actual life, as in so many Hollywood biographies? Finding Neverland would be a good example.

I am looking forward to finding out.

Did you see any of these? What did you think? Is there an author bio movie you really loved? Or really hated?
Do tell!

Thursday, March 21, 2019

New (ish) Answers to “Where Do You Get ideas?”

“Where do you get your ideas?” It’s probably the most asked question at author events. Some authors dislike it but I don’t mind. People genuinely want to know. Why not discuss? We’re not giving anything away. What the questioner makes of our responses will be his or her very own, and not a problem for us.

I believe it was Ray Bradbury who claimed there was a factory in Schenectady that manufactured all the ideas and sold them for a modest fee

but the most common answers are “Newspaper stories” and “Eavesdropping.” True for me. A tiny bit of information, almost an urban legend, was the start of my first Brooklyn book, and a series of news stories about a very odd crime- thefts of valuable stained glass from neglected cemetery chapels – was the germ, remembered for years, of the second.

A character in the third was inspired by a newspaper clipping in a library file, so that was newspaper, once removed.

Here are some of my recent discoveries:

My local paper is the New York Times which has a big real estate news section on Sunday. Real estate is big news in this always changing city.

Through the section covers major development and trends in depth, lately I find some of the best stories are in the

Q & A column. People are desperate to know how to deal with the difficult – noisy, nosy, threatening, rude, cat hating -or cat adoring! - neighbors. After love in all its forms, what can make people crazier than the spot where money and “my home, my castle” meet? And clash?

Recent gems were questions about the mice and insects coming from the apartment of a hoarder, a renter who does not understand why owners in the co-op building object to his free-roaming cat, and a belligerent neighbor who has taken to dropping in on every open house for possible home purchasers. You think that one might discourage a buyer? How about people who illegally occupy a cheap, rent-controlled apartment in this expensive city? How about the guy who makes his living investigating such cases?

The possibilities are endless.

Eavesdropping? I recently waited at a bus stop where an older man, friendly, cheerful and probably somewhat substance impaired, was flirting with a similarly aged woman. Far from being annoyed, she seemed thoroughly entertained. When he said, “But how can I marry you if I don’t know you’re a good cook?” she promptly said she was from Trinidad and starting telling him about the wonderful Caribbean delicacies she could make him. There was a lot of laughter.

My most surprising source recently was my very own files. I found some notes about a long ago crime wave in a small, farm-country town near where I grew up, perpetrated by the illegitimate children of the police chief. I thought, “Wow. I’ve just been handed a plot.”

I have absolutely no memory of ever writing those notes, and no source at all for the information. Did I read it in the hometown paper? Did someone just tell me a story? Was it accurate or just gossip? And does it even matter?

I can just make it up. It is fiction, after all. In the end, it doesn’t matter where it came from. It’s all about what we do with it.

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

HIDDEN GEM #4 The Tenement Museum

People often ask me “What should I do while visiting New York?” Llke the good librarian I once was, my response is always, “What interests you? History, art, science, sports, theater, architecture?” Because New York really does have it all. The truth is, so do other cities.

One of the things New York has, almost uniquely, is a history of immigration. Even when it was still Dutch New Amsterdam, it is estimated that 18 languages were spoken and ethnic groups included Dutch, Danes, English, Flemish, French, Germans, Irish, Italians, Norwegians, Poles, Portuguese, Scots, Swedes, Walloons, and Bohemians.

That history suggests a visit to the least hidden gem, the Statue of Liberty, and along with it- same boat, same ticket – the fascinating and moving Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. You will not come away unchanged, I promise.

Or, maybe you do not have a whole day to do this terrific excursion. Or, maybe you want to know more about what happened after. After the voyage. After the scary processing on Ellis Island. After the arrival in the Promised Land of New York. Hop a subway or bus or cab downtown to the Tenement Museum.

It is on the Lower East side, once

the most crowded neighborhood on the planet, home to successive waves of immigrants, hopeful new Americans-to-be.

Meet the families who lived in this building, long-abandoned 97 Orchard Street, now recreated to show different lives at different point in its history.

They are the actual families who lived there, and your guide will tell you about them and what happened after, when they moved on and moved away, and what happened to their descendants.

They were German, Irish, East European Jews, Italian.

The tenements were cheap, unsanitary, a disgrace to the city and eventually ordered closed or renovated. Most were shut down. It wasn’t worth the investment to make them livable.


1890's photo

Decades later, a group of people found that this building was available and that the complete records existed for the people who lived there. They went to work. In my early visits, they had touching taped memories - happy ones - of a couple of elderly ladies who were part of the last families who lived there in the 1930's.

Now the museum offers tours of the neighborhood as well as the original building, has added another building, offers programs with historical reenactors, has a sleek new visitors center, and works with the more recent neighborhood immigrants, ranging from Holocaust survivors to those from China and Latin America.

What? Did you think this story is over? It is not. While the neighborhood has become surprisingly trendy, some of the old places remain and the story of immigration continues. We live in debt to those brave or desperate souls who came here earlier and it matters that we remember their lives. They built this city, those impoverished immigrants, then and now.

American Immigrant Wall of Honor

You will not come away unchanged, I promise.

(And then you can have a meal at a hipster bar or restaurant, or choose a living piece of history such as 4^th-generation family business Russ & Daughters.)

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Tis the Time

I first wrote this in 2014 and posted it on both group blogs I belonged to then. I think they are still the right words. I have only added some personal photos at the end. Wishing lots of light as the nights grow longer and happy holiday season to all.

Triss

‘Tis the Time

It’s not chance that holidays this time of year are celebrated with lights as the days get shorter and the sun seems to be shrinking. We went to Newgrange in Ireland a few years ago, one of the many ancient places where people who had only primitive tools and no written language were nevertheless able to build a place where the sun on winter solstice comes right through a tiny window.

People join a lottery to be one of the very few allowed to sleep there that night and see the sun that morning. Sometimes the nature gods just don’t cooperate.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/newgrange-magic-felt-even-as-sun-fails-to-light-up-chamber-1.2045500

There has been an assumption that the lights are a form of sympathetic magic, that our long-ago ancestors feared the sun was going away for good and the lights would bring it back. Maybe not. Someone wrote recently that people who were capable of conceiving, and accomplishing, a project as large as Newgrange (or Stonehenge, or Chichen Itza) and siting it so perfectly on the right axis, were surely smart enough to remember, year to year, that the sun does come back.

However, we don’t have to be a modern Druid, or even believe in any religion at all, to enjoy the candles or to hope for light instead of darkness tomorrow. And for the whole year. This year has been a dark one in many ways for our world. May next one be better.

Wishing everyone the joys of the season, a bright new year and the light of many candles.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The Great American Read

In the midst of dark times, with hatred and murder and natural disasters seeming to come from all sides, talking about books might seem frivolous. And then I think about 9/11.

I was right here in New York that day. I did not lose a loved one or a home but it will be part of me forever. In the following days, I repeatedly saw and heard this quoted: “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” That is the beginning of the Divine Comedy.

Seven centuries later, Dante’s words still live. Anyone remember the politics of Florence that sent him into exile? No? I thought so.

In that spirit, I am writing about PBS's recent Great Books project, a nationwide conversation, via a television series, plus online and live events, about the books we love. Famous and not famous people shared the titles that changed their lives and campaigned for their favorites to be selected as America’s most loved book. Completing the package, Meredith Vieira warmly hosted and there were delightful, stylish, animated illustrations.

Some choices seem obvious. George RR Martin said, “If you are one of the six people who hasn’t read Lord of the Rings, what are you waiting for?”

And Gillian Flynn says she’s always liked to see what’s hiding under the rock. No surprise that her favorite is And Then There Were None. But others?

George Washington’s favorite book, we are told, was Don Quixote, a satirical comedy. Not the first quality that comes to mind when thinking of our first president.

And that quintessential New Yorker, Sarah Jessica Parker, urged us to vote for Things Fall Apart, the acclaimed novel of 1890’s Nigerian culture under pressure from colonialism. Would you have pegged Venus Williams favorite as the Chronicles of Narnia?

Astrophysicist Neal DeGrasse Tyson says, “In childhood, now, and probably forever, Gulliver’s Travels.” Think about that one and then enjoy the “Wow. I get it!” moment. A smart young girl from a tough neighborhood in Chicago talked movingly about how Hermione Granger got her through her childhood.

And a young woman with piercings (!) said Pride and Prejudice’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet taught her, “Keep doing you.”

Actress Ming NaWen’s love for The Joy Luck Club might seem obvious, but she reminded us that the stories of Chinese-American mothers and daughters crosses all boundaries. Suave, middle-aged Harvard scholar and public tv host, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told us that “the perfect novel” was Their Eyes Were Watching God, the moving tale of an impoverished young African-American girl. It was funny when Shaquille O’Neal said, ”Vote for Alex Cross, or else!” but who would have guessed that Alex Cross’s creator, James Patterson loves A Hundred Years of Solitude? (Come on. No one would have guessed that.)

Speaking straight from their hearts, the children of Brooklin, Maine, EB White’s home, discuss how Charlotte’s Web made an unlovable and scary creature, a spider, the hero, reminding us that there is more to friendship than appearance. We never outgrow that lesson, do we?

What was finally voted American’s most loved book? You’ll have to go find it yourself and you can, right here: https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/watch/grand-finale/

But I recommend watching the whole series. It starts with what and why, and even, if. books matter. And it has answers. https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/resources/downloads/

If you read books, share them, write them, talk about them, recommend them, you might change a life. And you never know when or why that magic shows up. Does the book reflect someone’s life and thus validates it? Does it say you are not alone? Open a door to another life? Another world? Introduce a friend as real - or more real!- than the ones in your real life?

Books remain that light in the dark forest of our lives.

And if that light in the dark woods happens to come from a street lamp with a mythical creature standing under it ? Well, go along for the adventure! In George RR Martin’s words, “What are you waiting for?”

Monday, September 17, 2018

Happy Birthday Little Women

Little Women is 150 years old this year. It's a much loved book, never out of print and filmed repeatedly, but sometimes dismissed as "only" a children's book, a girls book, a family story. Among the gifted people who would disagree with that are Susan Sontag, Doris Lessing, JK Rowling , Gloria Steinem and at least two of the Ephron sisters. AND Simone de Beauvoir.

It's been fun for a life-long fan like me to read the many thoughtful articles being published this summer. (I’ll attach some links at the end)

Myself? I read Little Women for the first time when I was much too young and certainly didn’t understand a lot of it. Someone had brought it as a gift, so I picked it up and found I could read it. So I did. I was seven; it took me a month. And I was captivated forever. For me, then, the book was telling the story the way it happened, so I was never one of the legions of girls who were shocked that Jo did not marry Laurie. I’m not entirely sure I understood there was even a person who was making it up. The sisters were real people to me, more real than anyone I knew. And I’m sure I thought I was the same age as Jo. The honest talk about how to live life, and grow as a person, was thrilling and inspiring.

I read it again and again throughout my childhood, as well as all the other Alcott books. Of course I have known for a long time that the March family was – and was not- the Alcotts, and Jo was – and was not- Louisa. Their life in Concord was - and definitely was not - the life of the Alcotts. It’s far more complicated and interesting than any child would understand. Ideas about why Little Women matters have changed over the decades, too, a fascinating window on changing times and changing ideas about girls.

Isn’t one of the definitions of a classic is that as you re-read it with more maturity, it too seems to deepen? That there is always more to find? I was lucky to grow up with the March girls.

And a PS, for what it's worth, my favorite filmed Jo is Katherine Hepburn, but my favorite movie of Little Women overall is the 1994 version with Winona Ryder. And I really do believe Alcott gave Jo the perfect life partner.