wildcat the movie

wildcat: The movie. The biography of writer Flannery O'Connor by Ethan Hawke.

 

I hate to say this, but the trailer is better than the movie.

The movie morphs back and forth from the life of Flannery O'Connor to scenes from her books. But it didn't use cues to let you know this (for example, in films usually dreams are tinted blue, or there are other clues that you have left the timeline for flashbacks).

I have read a few of her stories/books and recognized some of the scenes, but what about those who had not read anything? And why did the movie highlight these scenes? One suspects the scenes should point to experiences in her life. But they didn't. At least for an unsophisticated person like myself,, they seemed a distraction: They just seem to be inserted sort of like TV inserts commercials into programs that interrupt the flow of the story but don't have anything to do with the program.

and it leaves out her personal life: what scenes were when she at college or when she was at home? why didn't she marry Robert Lowell (There is a quick scene with him asking to marry him: did she have an affair with him? Did she refuse marriage because he was bipolar and violent at times? Did she refuse marriage because he was divorced and she was a good Catholic? Did she really love him at all?).

Summary: If you know about her life and writings, watch it. If not, it is a snooze fest.  

Trivia fact: Maya Hawke: The daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) plays Flannery and deserves an award for her acting.

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now, as a physician, let me add some stuff about her disease, Lupus, a very nasty auto immune disease that affects not only the joints but other organs.

Some background on Lupus and the illness of Flannery O'Connor illness from a doctor's point of view:

  Lupus has a high rate of psychiatric problems like depression and anxiety, and the film doesn't mention that the treatment (she mentions pituitary gland injections, which is an old treatment to increase your level of cortisone, without the side effect of inducing adrenal atrophy) can cause hyperactivity or even psychosis.

Since she died, not of Lupus but after surgery, one wonders if she had a sluggish adrenal gland that caused her to die because no one recognized the danger of addisonian crisis from stressful surgery. Or did she die of renal failure (the most common cause of death in lupus patients) because the stress of surgery tipped her borderline functioning kidneys into failure? Did the lupus and years of steroid treatment weaken her immune system so that she died of infection? 

Not much written about her medical crisis with surgery: PBS notes:

Doctors inform O'Connor her anemia is caused by a fibroid tumor and needs surgery. She continues to revise "Revelation" while in the hospital, hiding drafts under her pillow. The surgery reactivates her lupus. She grows weaker from post-surgery infections. O’Connor is readmitted to Baldwin County Hospital, falls into a coma, and dies early on Aug. 3rd. At age 39, O’Connor is buried next to her father in Milledgeville on Aug. 4th.

Sigh.

 you need to give patients who were on steroids for any reason a high dose of cortisone/prednisone during any stressful illness or surgery or they will go into Addisonian crisis: 

 trivia fact: This happened during back surgery on JFK, who had lowgrade Addison's disease but was not diagnosed with it No one was aware of his borderline Adrenal function (that could not respond to the need for more steroids with stress, so he went into shock), and they saved him by giving him steroids, and his case report was actually written up in the literature.,,

PBS had a documentary on her life if you want more information

and A Good Man is Hard to find audiobook:

...

Yale courses has this lecture on her writings.

Kristin Lavransdatter

I was delighted that David Warren's essay today is a book review on the classic book Kristen Lavransdatter.

Kristen Lavransdatter is the story of a housewife in medieval times, but it is more than that: it shows a woman in a complex society coping with adversity, including a wayward husband and losing her home. I liked it, not only for the story, but because it is an easy way to learn about the culture. Unlike many "historical" novels, Kristen does not act or think like a modern woman. And in the background you learn many facts about daily life (they ate porridge?).

By thirty pages in, we are not only bathed in this exotic environment, but exposed more directly to hard facts of life that are ignored, today, until it is too late. We feel the winter cold and the demands made to survive it; we begin to understand that if the crops fail, we will starve. The consequence of every human action is amplified, in the absence of our “safety nets.” The politics which Undset depicts are personalized, not abstract and ideological: men of all classes take counsel of each other, not from lofty principles but out of necessity. The dependency of man on man, of woman on woman, of man on woman, and woman on man, was no parlour game. We are about as far as we can get from the fatuities and asininities of “human rights.” 

Here Warren explains why this very feminist novel is not something that is encouraged to be read in Women's studies: because Kristen, and all the other women, see themselves as part of a family:

Undset absolutely refuses to be shallow. She grew up as a feminist; her own mother had been by 1880 well ahead of the “sisterhood” today. Our authoress had written when quite young various feminist tracts, and short novels meant to be “contemporary” and alarming. In the face of reality, through the First World War, she had grown out of it.

And from her own difficult life, full of man problems, and children not only her own, she was in no possible doubt that women are moral agents in the fullest truth.

Not only most spectacularly in her protagonist, Kristin, or in Kristin’s mother Ragnfrid, or later her daughter-in-law Jofrid, but in the little galaxy of other characters through the passing scenes, the theme of motherhood is revolved.

Moreover, not only Kristin in the foreground, but other females in the story are wilful souls. As we will see, for better and for worse, they will not be shackled. In the relations between the women, Undset tackles issues that even our best woman novelists tend to ignore: because Undset’s women live also through their men, their sons and their daughters, and therefore through time in a way our post-family microwave life has forgotten. This does not diminish but enhances their place in the world.

he prefers the older translation to the more modern one by Nunnaly, as I also do: it is more poetic, and echoes the older Norse tone of the original, but if you prefer easier reading, the Nunnaly one is the way to start.

I have read both translations, and have two copies with me here: One I brought with me, which I bought as a used book and is falling apart... and then my stepdaughter who had been an exchange student in Denmark and loved the book, sent me copies of the newer translation as a gift. 

But more recently, I am listening to it on my tablet (which reads ebooks), and you know, listening gives you a different version too: because you have to pay attention to parts that often I skim through while reading: things like scenery, or cooking, or small things that you might skim through as unimportant, like the priest who at one of her father's parties started a fight when someone mentioned a rumor (this seemed to be just a normal quarrel showing priests got drunk back then, but 300 pages later you find the priest knew the rumor was about her mother, and he wanted to shut the guy up).

It's a long read-- it is a trilogy, split into the courtship, the marriage, and her life as a widow--- but if you don't have it at your library, you can download it at internet archives LINK or read it on line.

There was a movie made on the first book LINK which gives an idea of the scenery and clothing and follows the plot of the book.



But I was annoyed at the film: it is miscast and the post Freudian bias in the script distorts the characters as one dimensional sexually repressed people. The cultural background is left out, as are a lot of the nuances and backstory that give insight to the characters.

Kristen, who in the book is so beautiful and graceful that a lot of men fall in love with her and want to protect her, is presented as a self centered neurotic female, and her charming, clintonesque lover/husband is portrayed by someone who looks and acts dorky. What is worse, there is no sexual tension between the characters as portrayed on screen.

Her loving father, who correctly sees Kristen's choice of husband is a mistake, is made out as if he is just a nasty puritan, and religion? not there at all.

this is one book one wishes that NetFlix or the BBC would film as a miniseries.

but if you have time, read the book, and then re read it later. Like most classics, it  is a hard slog to get through, but is worth a couple of reads.

The future of pleasure: Under Old Earth

a lot of the questions of genetic engineering (with underpeople/slaves made from animals and body parts grown on condemned prisoners  or pondering the question: If your personality is put into a computer, are you you?) are found in Cordwainer Smith's haunting science fiction, but until now I hadn't found this story on line: from Project Gutenberg Canada: what happens to your soul if you live forever in happiness?

Under Old Earth:

There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man.

The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again.

This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it.

Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fugues and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries—opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.

more of his stories HERE.

a few of the stories were made into audiodramas:

A wrinkle in time

LIN for audiobook by chapter... it seems to be a fan read book, but hey, it's free...

and here is the author discussing her fantasy writing.



actually, she also writes adult fiction and wonderful essays about life and family and writing.  I have several of her books including some from her "crosswicks journal" series.

 A wonderful and thoughtful book on caring for a parent with Alzheimer's disease is The Summer of the Great Grandmother.

Jane Austin post of the week

TeaAtTrianon links to a RadioTimes article about Jane Austen's time as a poor relation.

In Austen’s story, (Mansfield Park), Fanny, a poor relation, gets adopted by her wealthy aunt and uncle, and goes to live with them in their grand but unwelcoming mansion.

One of Austen’s brothers was likewise adopted by rich relations, which catapulted him out of the family of a country clergyman, and into the landed gentry far above. Austen would often go to stay with her brother Edward in his new home, the magnificent Godmersham Park in Kent. ... But there are hints that she felt out of place at Godmersham Park. A travelling hairdresser who came to the house, for example, would charge Austen only half-price for a cut, because of her “poverty”.

In return, members of the Godmersham family described Austen as “very much below par as to good society & its ways”

 see this film for more:

The first Feminist in literature

Utopian novel podcast

The podcast from Mythgard, which discusses scifi/fantasy novels, this weeks starts a discussion on the Dispossessed.

 The Dispossessed describes the twin worlds of Anarres, an anarchist world, and Urras, a world much like our own with countries of varied political systems, including two very large countries with systems that are at odds with each other. Told from the perspective of the Anarresti scholar Shevek, the book provides a thoughtful and shrewd look into the various political systems that Shevek encounters, including the one into which he was born, and finds both merits and faults in each. The Dispossessed is part of Le Guin’s larger Hainish cycle, which explores a variety of worlds and social systems.

I had the book in the US but didn't bring it with me to the Philippines.

However, you can listen to the audiobook by visiting Youtube.

part one

Part two 

I usually download these to listen to at my leisure, but lately the downloads won't work on my webbrowser, so I use youku downloader.

so far, no problems with it. and it means I don't have to rely on an iffy wifi to listen.

Ray Bradbury RIP

Science fiction/fantasy writer Ray Bradbury has died.

Best anecdote comes from Michael Ledeen:

The direct memory was of a speech he gave to a big crowd of American businessmen in LA, and he talked a lot about the power of imagination, and he urged them all to embrace their dreams, even the wildest ones, and to pursue them, because we’re in America and anything is possible.  After all, he’d spent years writing about Mars (both Mars as a metaphor and the “real” Mars), and then early one morning the first earth vessel was landing on Mars and he’d been invited to the Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena to watch the first pictures arrive.  He told us how excited he was, and how emotional everybody became when the first photos came in:  “they were wonderful pictures, and grown men were crying…”
And then a tv journalist shoved a mic into his face and said, “well, Bradbury, how does it feel?  All these years you’ve been dreaming about Mars and writing about Mars, and here are the first pictures from Mars, and there’s no sign of life anywhere.  So how does it feel?”
Bradbury yelled at us.  “I shouted at him.  I shouted “Fools!  Fools!  There IS life on Mars.  And it is US.”

in contrast to tale tellers (e.g. Heinlein and Asimov), Bradbury's prose is almost poetry:



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BrianSibley writes about a long correspondence and friendship with Bradbury, begun when Sibley was a young writer who wrote a fan letter, and actually got a personal answer.

I became a different person to the one I might have been because of Ray's gift for seeing the miraculous in the mundane and the tremendous possibilities in the trivial and his unerring talent for prising open the thoughts and emotions of an astonishing range of beings – humans, aliens, robots, puppets and dinosaurs – and giving us an empathetic understanding of their hopes and fears.

and he notes this bit of trivia: What book would Bradbury memorize (if all books were destroyed, as in Fahrenheit 451)? His answer: The Christmas Carol by Dickens...

Insomnia downloads of the week

Saint Charles Borromeo: A Sketch of the Reforming Cardinal by Stacpoole-Kenny, Louise M.


History of England from the Accession of James II - (Volume 4, Chapter 20 by Macaulay, Thomas Babington


Natural History Volume 2, The by Pliny the Elder, John Bostock


They also have some lighter listening:

Idylls of the King by Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

Christmas Carol Collection 2011 by Various

Christmas Carol, A-1 by Dickens, Charles

and these anthologies:

1. [Multilingual] Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2006" · (readers)
2. Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2007" · (readers)
3. [Multilingual] Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2008" · (readers)
4. [Multilingual] Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2009" · (readers)
5. [Multilingual] Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2010" · (readers)
6. [Multilingual] Various. "Christmas Short Works Collection 2011" · (readers)

Insomnia downloads of the day

The Worm Ouroboros is now on line as an audiobook...
that one put me to sleep simply reading it, so the audiobook should even be better...
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But for more cheerful listening, they also have Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout..

and the classic chilling scifi story The Machine Stops...

Old radio plays

Internet archive has some old radio plays on line at above link

come on, you know you always wanted to listen to " 3.9 MB
361128 History of the American Patent System"

actually most of them are classic books made into radio plays.
(headsup Maria Lectrix)

Books on line

Gore Vidal's book on Lincoln is now on line to read for free LINK....

or for lighter reading, try Helen Winslow's book Concerning Cats
or the exciting "Thuvia, Maid of Mars", by Burroughs.

audio books at Librivox

Audiobook of the week

Librivox has enchanted April for download.

Sunday stuff

An interview with MaryAnn Glendon, Harvard Law professor and now US ambasador to the Vatican.
Key idea: unlike the antireligion of the French enlightenment, in the US /England/Scotland it was compatible with religion and allowed religion to thrive along with rational thought.

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Why do ghosts wear clothing? more HERE.

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Strategypage on the Philippine terrorism news.
Slowly slowly things are getting better.

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PGWodehouse is on Librivox....try not to laugh too hard...

They also have the childen's classic Captains Courageous.
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and HAND FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE has broken out in China.
Actually, it's quite a common illness,--usually seen in summer, where you get sores in the mouth and tiny blisters on the hands and feet--- and usually makes kids miserable rather than dead, but there's been quite a few deaths there, so I wonder if it's a more severe strain of the disease.

Anne Rice: latest book

Anne Rice, of Vampire fame, returned to the Catholic church a couple years ago....and is releasing her second novel about Jesus...

What is interesting is that it got good reviews...no, haven't read the new ones, only the Vampire ones...that we get as used books at the palenke a year or two later...the "new" book store has only a small selection here in town...