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December 5, 2011    Northern Lights Over Fly-Creek

I re-worked my comments about Jim Atwell's book and posted a review on the Amazon site.  Forget the title I used, though.  Something like five white lights?

Jim Atwell has been writing a column for many years for the Cooperstown Crier. This book collects many of those he wrote after he got diagnosed with Parkinson's. The whole feels like much more than a collection though, because Jim's astonishingly vivid and intense voice creates a chord where before there were single notes. It is hilarious at times and delightful all the way through. It's Jim's voice that does all of this, Jim's song.

Unrepentant and unreformed New Critical Formalist that I am, I do have to note with approval that Jim followed the Aristotelian precepts and gave his book a fine five act structure. The scene that sets up the early stage of the book occurs when circumstances demand that the hero must piss into a snowstorm. We know from there on out that the spirituality of the journey will be earthy and human. The other four white moments of illumination follow as loose scaffold for the tale: the white turbaned hindu fellow who blesses the pilgrim (loved that part too), travel to the ancient white horse site in the hills of England, the white and black lambs on the farm, and in the epilogue the troupe of Cooperstown Rotarians who slog through drizzle and snow to sing carols.

Jim talks at one point about tone in a writer's work. No one wants to have Parkinson's or to have one's loved one have it. There is a good measure of pain and heartache in the book. The tone of voice with which Jim deals with all these themes and events becomes the most difficult feature to describe. It is in the experience of reading alone that you can feel it. It must come in part from the deepest silence Jim talks about as the key practice of Quakers. And it must come as well from a personal pool of silence within Jim Atwell. Silence and ultimately joy. We can feel that in the experience of the book. It is not a Quaker book, nor a Parkinson's book, nor an Oldster book. It is a marvelous book.

December 15, 2011   More Zeitgiest Modulations

I should give up on this blogging---can't even get the video posted in here properly.  But my theme today is humor and how it gets lost in translation.

We watched the Steve Carrell movie from the summer last night called "Crazy, Stupid, Love."   Enjoyed it and all.  Slow beginning and couldn't be sure just where it wanted us to go but after about minute 37 it finally kicked in, got funny and was fun.  Mostly.  It is also offbeat and quirky in the "new" modes--and however I phrase what comes next will date me but here goes and who cares--post maybe the tv show "the Office" and other such.  In other words, I can feel my age when I see these new comedies because while I know how I'm supposed to laugh at them there are still so many new codes in place I'm never quite sure and I am sure I don't laugh at them as effortlessly as I did those great comedies made when we were in our heydays---say, Woody Allen's "Sleeper," and the Diane Keaton one.  But then that might be one where my sense of humor started its own private tectonic slide.  Are tectonics even mentioned any more?  What about paradigm shifts?  Maybe I just haven't been part of any paradigm shifting conversations lately.

"Crazy Stupid Love" seems to belong in that category of "The Kids Are OK."

Or is it "all right?"  Sappy but not too sappy, trendy and very trendy, family upbeat comedies.  Only thing left to google today is whether Ryan Gosling really did do his own "Dirty Dancing" uplift dance effects.  The camera pulled back so it could have been a stunt double.