Pandora, the Flying Dutchman, Le Chat Noir and Paul Theroux (7 cents)

It’s a good thing that we had supper tonight at Le Chat Noir, with our friends Frank and Ahuva, and that I could enjoy the duck pate and bouillabaisse, because otherwise the bad taste in my mouth from watching the 1951 movie “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman” would linger still.

What a film. Ava Gardner (how could one person be married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes and a bullfighter?) and James Mason in a lavish, stylized film that is so bad that it seems to me that we can give up waterboarding and torture enemy combatants by making them keep watching it. The Flying Dutchman (Mason) is condemned to sail the earth forever alone until he finds a woman ready to die for the love of him. Pandora (Gardner), the true femme fatale, responsible for at least two deaths of spurned lovers (three if you include Mason who, of course, returns to life) until she gives her life for the Dutchman and the two of them drown in a storm off the Spanish coast. OK, it was free (a Saturday National Gallery of Art Film) and comfortable, but you have to have some standards.

And, while I am complaining, what is this about world famous travel writer Paul Theroux? In the Smithsonian Magazine this month, he and a number of other travel writers are given the opportunity to visit the place they would like to see and have never visited. The medina of Fez, Krakow and Gdansk, the Punjab, Tahiti, the west coast of Japan…..all reasonable. But Theroux picks a cross country drive, from Los Angeles to Cape Cod. It’s like he has never been to America before! For the first time, he seems to marvel at the freeways of Los Angeles. For the first time, he goes to Las Vegas. For the first time, he sees Arkansas and Kentucky. And his descriptions are sophomoric at best, ending with calling the USA “the most beautiful country I’d ever seen.” I haven’t read Theroux’s books, like The Great Railway Bazaar or the many others. Are they all this weak?

Two good books; one bad meal (12 cents)

I have to start by saying that Lucy Honig, author of the new novel “Waiting for Rescue”,is a friend, a college classmate of my wife. Lucy has spent much of her life writing, and winning recognition of and prizes for, short stories. “Waiting for Rescue” is her second novel. She tells us that, although the official publication release date is not until sometime after the first of September, it is already available through Amazon. It is published by Counterpoint, in soft cover only.

If the mark of a good book is whether or not you want to continue reading or, in the alternative, put it aside, this book is terrific. I read it over two or three days, in a few long sessions, but more importantly, by snatching five minutes here, and ten minutes there. I clearly wanted to know what was going to happen next.

The book is written in the first person; it reads like fact, not fiction, more like a blog, or a diary. The narrator is a teacher of writing in a public health department of a major university in Boston. In fact, the author spent many years in just this role. But, from reading her brief biography on the cover the book, you would never know this. This was obviously a conscious choice, and I wonder why.

There are several characters important to the book – a young graduate student from Sudan, who develops a fatal illness; a young faculty member whose father may, or may not, be a convicted murderer; a second staff member, a middle aged Russian, who has an affair with the narrator; a director of a public health observation program in Kenya. Each of their stories in fact is a short story, tied together by the various interconnections of the characters, but able to stand on their own. But they are sufficiently tied together, with a simply but somewhat quirky rhythm. I felt that I was just floating down a river, calm here, mild rapids there, watching the scenery go by.

I think that’s a good way to put it. The book flows. It does not build to a climax. It could go on forever. Story after story would continue to develop.

The second book was written about 15 years ago, “Colored People”, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s memoir of his pre-college years, growing up in a small paper mill town in West Virginia. Gates, Harvard literature professor and department head, gained notoriety with his recent run-in with the Cambridge police.

I realized that I knew virtually nothing about Gates. Now I know a fair amount about his early years, I know that he has a surprisingly engaging writing style, and that he is an apparently unabashed memoirist. By that, I mean that he tells it as he sees it, describing people as he viewed them, in great detail, their strong points and their weaknesses exposed for all to see. I admire this type of writing, particularly since I cannot seem to emulate it. I am afraid I will embarrass myself, or that I will upset others.

He talks about his extended family, the surprisingly open sexual practices of the so many members of the colored/Negro/black community of the town of Piedmont, his own intellectuality, lack of athleticism and combination of shyness and arrogance, his many friends, and the delicate and changing nature of relations between blacks and whites. The book was apparently quite a big seller when it came out. I recommend it highly.

I wish my dinner Sunday night was as good as these books, but our night out with friends at Chef Geoff’s was quite a disappointment. We probably won’t repeat it. And, to add salt to the wound, when I walked out of the house this morning, I saw a note stapled to the telephone post in front of the house. This telephone post collects a lot of stapled notices; I regularly pull them off. This particular note was posted by (and how random is this?) Chef Geoff’s, a restaurant probably two miles from the house, advertising a Yappy Hour (bring your dog and have a drink or dinner on the patio on August 26). Not only random, but WEIRD. Another reason to stay away.

The Onion, Julia, Julie, The Magnificent Max and 60 Minutes (one cent)

“Julie & Julia” – first movie I have seen all summer, I think.  And what a great movie.  Meryl Streep and Amy Adams both played their parts beautifully, and the back and forth transposition between the Childs in Paris (and elsewhere) and the Powells in Queens was masterful.  The cinematography was extraordinary – I really thought they filmed it in Paris of the 1950s (and I really want the Buick stationwagon) and the Queens neighborhood provided an extraordinary contrast in every way.  The dialog was continually witty and flawless – Nora Ephron did a great job as screenwriter.  I smiled throughout the movie, when I wasn’t laughing (and I do wish that the fight episode between Julie and Eric was not included; it was the only real downer). I cannot recommend this film too strongly.

As to Julia Child herself, I remember her from her TV show (which as a youngster I never thought too much of).  I remember her from my days in and around Cambridge and how the Broadway Super Market (at least that’s how I remember the name) was known by everyone as the store where Julia Child buys her food.  I don’t remember her books back then.  I know my mother had Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking as a main source (but didn’t everyone in St. Louis?), but I don’t think French cuisine ever entered our house.

We do now have a copy the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in very good condition, and dated 1961, the date the book was first published.  Looking at the used book sites, it is surprising to see how few copies of any edition are available for sale, and how expensive the older ones are.  But ours is something of a mystery.  It’s not a first edition, because the three authors are listed not alphabetically, but with JC first, but there is no subsequent date on it (I know that the book was reprinted in the 1970s and several times since, most recently, I believe, in 2001, and that this later edition is still being sold new), and I cannot find any other reference to the edition we have.

As long as I am complimenting folks, I have to put in a plug for this week’s The Onion (August 20).  Although I often find this paper’s humor a bit sophomoric, in this issue they have two brilliant articles.  One entitled “Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care”.  As the fake Nancy Pelosi says, “Both parties understand that the current system is broken.  But what we can’t seem to agree upon is how to keep it broken indefinitely, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever.  It’s a very complicated issue”.  Equally clever is the article entitled “Film Edition of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book”, providing a preview of a new movie that will ends after the first 142 pages in the book (because that’s when most readers put it down), that uses a new ’skim-over’ technique for those sections of the story that readers normally skip through, and that replays earlier scenes with more concentration and detail, so you can better understand what is happening in real-story time.  As one critic says:  “when I saw Michael Caine up on that screen, repeating the same line over and over and over again as the audience looked on blurry eyed, I knew they had pulled it off”.

I did read a little over the weekend, starting and finishing on the same day Max Beerbohm’s 1911 book Zuleika Dobson.  Why I read it and why I read it through to the end, I am not sure.  It is a fairly well known book, and the only novel written by the early twentieth century English critic, humorist and caricaturist, and it contains a lot of very big words, and only a few less illusions to Greek mythology that passed right over my head.  The plot line is simple – the beautiful Ms. Dobson comes to visit her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford, and meets the handsome Duke of Dorset, a male version of herself.  They fall in love with each other, but have vowed never to love anyone who loves them in return, so their connection is doomed from the start.  To escape, the Duke decides to commit suicide, as to all of the other Oxford undergraduates:  he is ending his life because his beloved loves him back (sort of), and they because they love Zuleika, who pays them no heed because they are not up to her standards.  And, yes indeed, the entire Oxford undergraduate body commits suicide by drowning after the big crew race.

Yes, there’s more to the story than that (although not much).  What gets me is that, when the book was written, the concept of the Oxford student body dying for such a worthless cause seemed preposterous, and thus a subject of satire, but lo and behold, come 1914, World War I starts and so many young English scholars died for what turned out to be equally a worthless cause.  Prescience?  Coincidence?

(I also read through the late Don Hewitt’s book Minute by Minute, the story of “60 Minutes”, the show he created and produced for so long.  Filled with anecdotes, and ironic interview segments, this book was a delight to read through.

Maine and Nova Scotia (the highs and the lows) ($2.37)

The best city visited:  Portsmouth NH (I know it’s not in ME or NS) – quite a surprise.  How did they make it so livable? (This is not to take anything from Halifax NS, Fredericton, NB, or Concord NH, all of which were quite nice, or even Bangor ME, which surprised me by being not so bad.)

The worst city visited:  Truro, NS.  After visiting such a large number of wonderful places in the province, we made the mistake of turning off the road to go to see Truro.  One of the world’s more depressing places, I am sure.  And. to top it off, there is the town sculpture, which you see everywhere.  I don’t know the full history – it appears that they are wooden sculptures hewn from elm trees lost to Dutch elm disease.  But they are (to my inexpert eye), every one of them, awful.

The best restaurants:  There were several.  Surprisingly good Italian food at Piccolo in Ridgefield CT, with Eric and Marcella.  A wonderful dinner at Pier 77 in Kennebunkport with Michelle, Jonathan, Nick, Margaret, Roger and Eileen.   Brussels, a Belgian restaurant  in Halifax, NS (on Granville Street; is it a coincidence that Granville Moore’s in DC is a Belgian restaurant with similar characteristics, like mussels, french fries and sauces?). Two delicious dinners at the Tempest in Wolfville, NS.  The Old Port Sea Grill in Portland ME.  And, surprisingly, John’s Pizza in Old City, ME, where we got a 12 inch veggie pizza and two drinks for $7.50.  Impossible to pick the best.  (And this ignores the delicious home made meals we had in Gloucester MA, Kennebunkport, and Hunts Point NS. and the party food at Jerry and Joan’s.)

The worst restaurant:  This is an easy one – the Ramada Inn in Frederictown NB.  The canned carrots at the Sunday night buffet were so bad that I wrote a note to the waitress with them.  I probably should also mention Maggie McFly’s in Middlebury CT, and Angelina’s outside of Truro NS, although it’s possible with these two that things might have turned out differently if we had ordered differently.

The best antique store:  An antique mall in Bangor ME.

The worst antique store:  A small store near the LeHave River ferry to Lunenburg, NS, where they had fewer things than we have in our basement.

The best gift shops:  The Amos Pewter and Kiln Art glass shop in Chester, NS, and the Catfish Moon gift shop in Annapolis Royal, NS.

The best tea shop:  the fantastic Sawadee in downtown Halifax.

The best boat experience:  Sailing off the coast of Kennebunkport.

The most boring boat experience:  The car ferry from Portland to Yarmouth NS.  Would the 5.5 hour trip been better if I had played the slot machines?

The best signs:  The Holiday Inn marquee which simply read:  “See us on Facebook”.  The rural coffee shop somewhere in southern New Hampshire, which had a sign that said: “The best cup of coffee east of the Mississippi”.  The gun store in northern Maine, which advertised:  “Concealed weapons classes:  how to carry a concealed weapon”.

The best shopping experience:  The Farmers Market in Wolfville, which is very high on the sophistication scale (food, jewelry, crafts).  And the Goodwill Store in Sanford ME, where Edie got a Donagel wool sweater in perfect condition, and I got a heavy cotton ribbed L.L. Bean sweater, also in excellent condition, each for $4.98.

The greatest natural phenomena:  The tides on the Bay of Fundy, which we viewed (at high and low) at Kingsport NS, (22 – 29 foot tides), the extraordinary Joggins Fossil Cliffs south of Truro for the tides, the fossils and the setting, and the chimney at the Wolfville Nature Center, where every night, precisely at dusk, the chimney swifts swoop into the chimney for their night’s rest.

The best used book stores:  John Doull in Halifax, The Odd Book in Wolfville, Yes Books in Portland, and Northwood Books in Northwood NH.  The worst used book stores:  the Travelers’ Restaurant in Union CT where you get a free book with every meal, or can look at the moldy books in the basement, and the bookshop in Brattleboro VT, where the marquee informs you that 75,000 books are inside, but where, once you go in, you realize that the books would be rejected at by Doull, Yes, Odd Book or Northwood.

The best finds:  $2.36 Canadian, which I found on the grounds of the Catholic church in Lunenburg NS, a toy red lobster, found on the grounds of a funeral parlor in Wolfville, and a small model truck found in Liverpool NS.

The best museum:  The Rossignol Cultural Center in Liverpool NS, which houses an enormous collection of fascinating collections, including (but not limited to) its Outhouse Museum (don’t believe me?  Google it.)

The weirdest museum:  The Nova Scotia Museum of Art, which (putting aside its great folk art collection) seemed to have a lot of very little, and whose exhibit on technology was unbelievable.  They collected outmoded technology artifacts (such as old computer monitors, televisions, etc) from non-profits in the city, put them on shelves, and studied and tagged each of them, dividing them into three categories:  can be fixed,  can be used somewhere else as is, should be thrown out.  They had a guy there analyzing each, wondering how he would get the job done on time.

The best entertainment:  Ryan Clark’s engaging folk music at the Halifax Parade Ground, the Dream State Circus duo, who worked with flames and acrobatics as part of the Halifax Buskers’ Festival, and the Dukhs, a folk group, at the Tuesday night concert in Ridgefield.

The worst entertainment:  The two athletic guys at the Buskers’ Festival who had an unfunny and tasteless acrobatic act and wore Union Jack underpants (they call themselves the English Gents), and the two guys singing (?) and playing (?) guitars on the streets of Portland, who made you want to cross the street — fast.

The best custom experience:  Coming back to the US.  Three minutes and a nice “Welcome Home”.

The worst custom experience:  Off the ferry, driving through Canadian customs, which took us 45 minutes.

The most surprising things we learned:  Everything about the Bay of Fundy (although we sort of knew about this), and the 1912 explosion in the Halifax Harbor which started a fire which claimed over 2000 lives.  Also, the fact that many of the Acadians, after they were expelled by the British in the middle of the 18th century, returned, but not to NS; they came back to New Brunswick where approximately 40% of the population has an Acadian background.  And the body collection mission sent out from Halifax after the sinking of the Titanic, and the hundreds of bodies which were brought back to shore; we visited the Christian and Jewish cemeteries where over 150 of them are buried in simple graves.

The most surprising weather:  90 degrees in New Brunswick.

The best places to stay:  with our friends.

The oddest B & Bs:  our Gloucester home with a room with a loft (“for the kids”) accessible by dangerous stairs leading to a dangerous loft, and the room over the garage in Wolfville, with the hot tub in the large bathroom, no cross ventilation and the antithesis of design all around.

The best ice cream:  coffee with a hint of Kahlua and dark chocolate tips (Bart’s Ice Cream) at a coffee shop in Brattleboro NY.

The best botanical gardens:  the Public Victorian Garden in Halifax, and the Historic Gardens in Anapolis Royal, NS.

Other notable things:  the roughness of the South Shore of NS compared with the manicured agricultural valley near the Bay of Fundy; the number of trees in New Brunswick; the historical fishing industry, and how it has declined so much in so many places; the many colored painted lawn chairs all over NS; the strength of Acadia University (about which I knew nothing at all) in Wolfville, and its extensive botanical gardens, conservatory, and hiking trails.

Much more, of course, but that’s a lot for right now.  We drove about 2350 miles all told.  With the Prius, I think we got about 51 miles to the gallon.  So, about $125 for gas, I guess.  Not bad.  With a normal car, it would have been twice that.

A Little Mediocraty and What I Thought About on my Morning Walk (one cent)

Having  been so impressed with J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron, I tried Disgraced, the book which, in 1999, won him the second of his two Booker Prizes.  I did not think that Disgraced met the standards set in Age of Iron.  But going to Amazon’s website and looking at the readers’ reviews, I saw something that I don’t think I have seen before to the same extent.  People absolutely loved the book (5 stars) and people absolutely hated the book (one star) – extreme divergence.  I’d probably leave it a about 3 stars.  It is a Lolita-like book, with an older professor (if 51 is older) and a 20 year old student having an affair, initiated to her surprise by him, but from time to time welcomed by her (and from time to time, not welcomed).  The affair is stopped when her perhaps violent boyfriend gets wind of it, as well as her parents, and an official complaint is lodged with the university, at which point he agrees to a voluntary termination of his employment.  He leaves Capetown taking temporary shelter with his lesbian daughter (who has just broken up with her partner), who is running a farm solo in country not very friendly to young, lone white girls running farms.  Terrrible things happen, etc., etc.  I guess it is a book about male power (there is a older black male with a very young “wife” who helps out at the farm; perhaps his instincts are similar to the professor’s, but their social circumstances are different), there is an older woman who seduces the surprised, but willing for a while, professor.  There is even dinner with the young girl’s parents at their house, where they are looking for an “apology”.  But he is not really apologetic, at least not in his own terms; he is sorry for what happens, but not apologetic.  And so it goes.  3 stars only.  Surprised it won a Booker (but the 5 star Amazon reviewers aren’t surprised at all).

Food mediocrity:  Dinner with friends at the vegetarian Vegetable Garden, a Chinese restaurant in Rockville that has been around for sometime now.  It is not an expensive restaurant, but it goes out of its way to create complicated vegetarian dishes – too complicated, and usually just so-so (although they look pretty).  And the next night, I found myself in Germantown MD alone and wanted a quick, light meal.  I went into a shopping center Chinese restaurant called Peking Cheer; it was awful.  I later went to on-line reviews.  The reviewers were pretty consistent:  this was a great Chinese restaurant……until new owners took over sometime last year.  (I will say that Thursday night’s dinner at home, and last night’s at friends’, made up for the mediocrity).

I took a walk this morning to the Chevy Chase library to return Disgraced.  On my way back, I saw an advertising sign for a house cleaning company with the message:  “Cleaning is our Passion”.  I thought about that, and wondered if it was really true.  I know that some people are anal about cleanliness.  Then, a private charter bus passed by.  It was from the Reliable Bus Company.  I wondered if reliability was their passion.  Also, it could be the case.  And then I wondered if I would want a cleaner who was passionate about cleaning.  How would I get them out of the house?  What if they wanted to come back that very afternoon?  What if they were passionate, but unskilled.  What is they just weren’t reliable?

Then I thought about slogans.  I remembered the coffee shop in Dublin with a big sign that said:  “Possibly the best coffee in Dublin”.  I compared it to a sign I had recently seen on a Washington coffee shop:  “The best cup of coffee in the world”.  Geography aside, which one would you choose?

Cordelia and her father Lear:  she loves him just as she should.  No more, no less.  But that wasn’t enough for Lear.  He needed “Loving you is our passion”, or “The best lover of a father in the world”.  It didn’t do him any good.

I think I will stick with reliability and possibly Dublin’s best coffee.  And I think I’ll try another book by Coetzee.