Poetry Is Everywhere

This has been a week of mourning for the printed word, as my local paper, The Oregonian, takes the ax to its staff, its home delivery, and its print content.  However, as I walked home from the coffee shop, where I had been sitting reading a printed book by the small, independent local Forest Avenue Press, I saw a poem posted in someone's yard.  I stopped and read it and it nearly brought tears to my eyes.  For the rest of my walk, everything around me wanted to be a poem, too.  Then, at home, there was a poem in my email from my friend, William S. Gregory.  And, perusing the blogosphere, another poem called to me from Christi Krug's site A Fire By Night.  With poetry all around me, perhaps the portentous omens I have seen in the news of dying bees and dying customs are not so very dire after all.  Thank you, poets, one and all.

Penguin's Pushcart

While reading recently about the Book Expo of America, I came upon a news item about the Penguin Group's old-fashioned, print-only Book Truck and Pushcart, a mobile store scheduled to travel the Route 66 journey made famous in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (one of my all-time favorite novels) and partly-inspired by New York's classic hotdog carts.  I found this notion wholely delightful, and very much in line with the strange dichotomy our modern world seems to be embracing - high-tech digital wonderment on one hand, low-tech retro small-business on the other.  

I must admit this dichotomy makes me unreasonably happy.  Maybe it's because I live in Portland.  The old-fashioned traveling bookstore notion represented by Penguin's Book Truck falls right in line with the locally-sourced movement of restaurants and the movement towards repairing over replacing in the realm of other products, not to mention the food cart revolution that has allowed small business restaurateurs a fiscally low-risk entry-point.  E-books seem to have dealt a serious blow to big name publishing houses and bookstores, but the indies are thriving, and benefitting from the access to technology such as print-on-demand.  With their pushcart/book truck idea, Penguin appears to be engaging in competition on indie terms.  

We humans seem hell-bent on finding ways to keep our humble, simple humanity, community and craftsmanship intact even as we catapult ourselves through cyberspace.  I say this cycling back to basics while embracing progress is healthy.  It  gives me hope.  I'm not a luddite; I'm a humanist.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/05/28/4260003/book-industry-gathers-for-annual.html#storylink=cpy

Don't Give Up

Remember that post I wrote recently about whether it was time to give up?  Well, this weekend I got my answer.  It was most emphatically NOT time to give up.  I won't share details now, but suffice it to say I stand before you today prepared to shout from the rooftops to those of you who are feeling discouraged:  DON'T GIVE UP!  Do the work.  Write the story you have to tell.  Write other stories. Explore a variety of genres.  Keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Listen to the signals others send you.  Listen to your gut.  Keep cultivating the ground.  This is a marathon.  But there is hope.

Great Gatsby: The Movie

I am a fan of Baz Luhrmann.  I love his bold, sometimes crazy, never dull choices.  I love his distinctive style.  I love his fabulous, if sometimes flawed films.  There is no one else like him.  And when I heard he was directing a film version of THE GREAT GATSBY I said, "YES!!  That is a match made in heaven."

Why?  Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing is rooted in richly textured sensory details and descriptive images that make you catch your breath and savor.  His themes and moods are embedded in that imagery.  It is his signature and what makes him great.  And the glittering magnificence of the surface is an essential element of his stories.

So, I had high expectations for this film.  And I knew there would be those who would hate it.  Baz isn't everybody's cup of tea.  I was right.  The reviews have been luke warm.  But from where I'm sitting, Baz knocked this one out of the park, and his cast did too.

First off, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire are perfectly cast.  DiCaprio captures not just Gatsby's surface layer but every other layer beneath it, and Maguire makes Nick Carraway's role in this story so clear, so essential.  Their performances, and Baz's direction, bring out Fitzgerald's themes of within and without, of the watcher and observer juxtaposed against the participants in life.

Now, I knew Baz would nail the over-the-top frenzied and desperate extravagance of Gatsby's parties, and he did.  But what took my breath away was his absolute grasp of the intimate quiet moments and the minute and subtle details.  Those are what make Fitzgerald's writing sing, and those were present.  Baz nailed the contrasts between the loud manic parties and the simple human emotions.

Purists take issue with the use of hip-hop music at times in the soundtrack, but to my mind it is the perfect way to convey to a modern sensibility the mood of a raise-the-roof so-loud-you-don't-have-to-think partying mentality.  At the same time, the way Baz uses those moments in the soundtrack, which are not constant but very carefully placed, forces us to recognize that this is not just a story of the Jazz Age, as it is so often characterized. Rather, it is a story of the American economic truth as it collides and recollides with individual human truth in the past, present and future.  The film's choice of language from the book, right down to the final moments, embraces this notion.  "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  This is not just a story of that time, but of our time, of American experience, of the haves and have-nots, the 1% and the 99%, and everyone in-between.

As for the frame story of Carraway writing his tale while in a sanitorium, it's a choice that falls for me into the category of Baz's inevitable and forgivable mis-steps.  It didn't ruin the film for me.  In some ways, it may have enhanced Carraway's character a bit, and forced me to think about aspects of the story in a different way.  But it also provided one of a handful of subtle yet, to my mind, intentional nods towards the Orson Welles classic CITIZEN KANE, whose link with Gatsby had never before occurred to me and now seems incredibly obvious.  Both tales are rather hard, sad looks at the underlying messiness behind the classic rags-to-riches vision of the American dream.  I might almost have been afraid to make this connection with such a revered icon of American cinema had not my husband, the world's biggest Welles fan, mentioned it first.

Finally, a word about the other funky possible mis-step, the letters and words from the story that float across the screen.  Some might see this as heavy-handed.  I imagine the film would have worked brilliantly without it.  However, it didn't mar the experience for me, and I think it was a genuine gesture of respect and affection for the fact that this story is one of the great works of American literature.  The words, the language, are an integral part of its greatness, so Baz chose to emphasize and celebrate that through the visual medium.

Suffice it to say that I loved this film, I want to see it again, and I must now reread GATSBY. As for those who don't care for it and don't get it, I am mystified.  Let us nod politely to one another as we pass on the street of opinion and then walk on.