On an island and under the sea

I'm reading The Long-Winded Lady, a compilation of essays by Maeve Brennan. She was an Irish writer who for many years published short pieces in the New Yorker, under the pen name of The Long-Winded Lady. It's hard to describe her writing. They're not really essays at all, just little bits of observation, almost all about a very small piece of New York City where Brennan lived. She writes about the same handful of restaurants where she ate lunch and dinner almost every day, and about the series of hotel rooms and apartments where she lived (never, it seems, for more than a few months at a time), and about the passing scene on the city blocks where she lived and worked.

There's almost no dialogue in these essays. She writes about people, but from a remote observer's perspective. I'm about halfway through the 500 or so pages, and I don't think she wrote anything about anyone whom she actually knew. Only descriptions of strangers--their clothes (she seemed to love fashion and was knowledgeable about cuts and fabrics), their manners, their restaurant orders.

People say that big cities are the most provincial of places. I don't know who those people are, but I know that someone said that, and it wasn't me. Anyway, Maeve Brennan's New York is not so much provincial as just tiny and self-contained. She writes with great sophistication about sophisticated people and places but she seems not to have strayed beyond an area of 16 or so square blocks, except for occasional theater visits.

Because the essays are so sparsely populated, mostly with people whom Brennan didn't seem to know, they have a very lonely quality. If you have ever been in New York City (or any other big city) on a Sunday in August, you will have an idea of what it feels like to read The Long-Winded Lady. Still, the book is not sad or depressing. She writes so little about herself--even when she tells us where she had dinner, she doesn't tell us what she ate--that the reader senses that there's a lot more to this woman than she's sharing. It's like you're looking into the wrong end of a telescope, seeing a compressed and constricted view of a landscape that would be enormous, if only you could see it through the right side of the telescope.

*****
As good as The Long-Winded Lady is, it's not a completely original and groundbreaking work of art. If you've read Louis Auchincloss or Mary McCarthy or any other upper-class mid-century New York writer, then you already know something about Maeve Brennan's New York.

*****

Here's what was completely original and groundbreaking:

Even Squidward is smiling. Kind of.

I used to tell friends that I didn't know what I'd do when my children grew up, because then I wouldn't have an excuse to watch SpongeBob anymore. Fortunately, they like him just as much now as they did when they were toddlers, wide awake at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning. Only a visionary artist could have imagined an undersea world populated by cheapskate crabs, megalomaniac plankton, cynical squids, idiot starfish, bottom-dwelling squirrels; and hard-working, relentlessly cheerful, fun-loving sponges. Bikini Bottom is a world unto itself, completely original, populated by characters who are unalterably themselves in every circumstance

SpongeBob SquarePants is hilariously funny, and that would be enough. But it's much more than that. Almost every episode offers wise and compassionate insight into humanity (well, so to speak) in all its beauty and stupidity and strength and weakness and joy and bitterness. Does that seem a little much for a cartoon? Watch "Tentacle Acres" or "Band Geeks" or "The Algae's Always Greener"  and you'll see what I mean. Or just watch "Sailor Mouth" or "The Inmates of Summer," and laugh your head off.

SpongeBob will live forever; but Stephen Hillenburg, his creator, died this week.  I hope he knew how special SpongeBob is, and how much he means to so many people. I hope he rests in peace.

Holiday

It's Thanksgiving weekend; Friday to be exact. I didn't have to cook dinner this year, other than mashed potatoes, so yesterday was a pretty easy day, but of course, now I don't have a refrigerator full of Thanksgiving leftovers, either. There's always a price to pay.

*****
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I like the food, I like the thin sunlight streaming through the nearly bare trees on Thanksgiving morning, and I like seeing the happy mothers reunited with their college children for a weekend. I like the overstocked grocery stores and the busy restaurants on the Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, as people rush around collecting their groceries and avoiding their kitchens until Thanksgiving day. I like the simplicity. No one expects more than to eat a little bit too much, and then to lounge with their families around the fireplace or the TV, waiting for the food coma to set in.

I usually watch AMC's Thanksgiving Godfather marathon as I cook. My husband teases me. "This again?" he says. "Haven't you seen this movie like a hundred times?" This is a ridiculous exaggeration. I've seen The Godfather and The Godfather II no more than twenty-five times each. Thirty at MOST. My husband, however, watches football nearly every Sunday, and for a good part of Thanksgiving weekend every year. If anyone wishes to explain to me how every single football telecast is not EXACTLY like every other football telecast, I'll listen with polite interest. Only after you're no longer in the room will I roll my eyes and say "whatever" as I reach for the remote to turn the Corleones back on.

*****
We host a neighborhood get-together on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, so I shopped for food today. It's much colder than usual this Thanksgiving weekend, but that only enhances the cozy atmosphere. Other than potatoes, I didn't cook yesterday. And other than breakfast eggs, I'm not cooking today, either. I'll finish readying the house for the party, and we'll eat some takeout, and then we'll go to the movies. I have to work a bit on Sunday because proposal deadlines wait for no one. I don't know why government contracting officers set proposal deadlines for the Monday following a holiday weekend, but I know better than to ask people about their business. But it's OK. A little work will make me feel a little less spoiled and over-privileged, a little less embarrassed by this embarrassment of riches. Happy Thanksgiving. Leave the gun, but take the cannoli.

Cahier d'affaires

When I was in Montreal this past summer (oh, summer--how I miss you), I bought a French-language day planner for 2019. Now I'm not so sure about it. It's fine that it's in French; I know the days of the week and the months of the year. It's the format, and the tiny font. I can't see it. I don't want to talk about my eyesight right now. But it's not so good.

I started shopping for a different planner, but there are way too many to choose from. So many formats. So many "dashboards" (a candidate, along with "metrics," for most overused business word ever). I'm not sure how a paper calendar page, no matter how complex its layout, can be called a "dashboard," but that's a question for another day. Meanwhile, I'll probably just stick with the planner that I bought. C'est bien.

There's a lot going on on this page, isn't there?
And it's all in French, and too small to read. 

Anyway, French or English, a planner is necessary because I have a lot of stuff to keep track of. I'm busy morning to night, and I don't want to stop. I get anxious when I stop moving. So I keep moving.

*****

The early 50s are an interesting age to be. I have friends who are just a few years older, and they're winding down. They're not quite ready to retire, but they're planning for it, and not just in a vague, pie-in-the-sky, "someday when I retire" way. They're making concrete arrangements, and picking the actual dates when they'll just stop working.

Sometimes when I'm tired, I think that it would be nice to just retreat from the world; and I wish, just for a moment, that I was also winding down. Then I think about the implications of not having enough to do, and not being needed every day, and the whole idea of leisure loses its charm. I see the TV commercials with the soon-to-retire couples (the woman always appears to be a decade younger than her husband) meeting with their financial adviser and planning for 30 or so years of travel and gardening and boating and beach-sitting and all of the other things that people are supposed to want to do during retirement, and I just can't imagine myself embarking on a life of full-time rest.

*****


via GIPHY

Well, maybe.

*****

When Social Security and the idea of retirement as a lifestyle were invented average life expectancy was pretty low compared to now. The idea of Social Security was that if you survived past 65, then you probably wouldn't be strong enough to keep working, and there should be some sort of safety net that would allow you to spend your last few years in relative comfort and security. And I'm all for this. I'm human, so I like comfort and security. I also like travel and beach-sitting as much as the next person,. But I don't think that we're meant to spend so much time idle. People live into their 80s now, but they still retire in their 60s. Beyond the obvious strain that 20-plus years of retirement puts on a system that was designed to support two to five years at most, there's the larger question of what we as human beings were created for. As much as any person might enjoy decades of carefree downtime, it's probably not what we're meant to do.

*****

I like working. I like having something to do every day that's important and meaningful. I like making money. I like making friends with the people I work with, and having people to commiserate with when things go badly, and to celebrate with when things go well. I like taking care of my family. I don't want to stop doing those things now or any time soon.

Plus, I have a kid starting college next year.

*****

This started with something about a planner, didn't it? I don't know how it turned into a manifesto for delayed retirement and productive old age. I almost included a side trip into the (real, I promise you) world of food nostalgia. That's a whole post in itself. Something to look forward to, n'est-ce pas?

Highlights

I just finished Wallflower at the Orgy, and it turns out that Nora Ephron is just as honest about herself as Joan Didion. Maybe even more so. In an essay titled "Makeover," she writes about the women's magazine makeover craze of the 70s and 80s, and her personal experience with plastic surgery and high-fashion hair and makeup, and her disappointment with the results on herself. As a woman who learned early how to be funny because I wasn't going to get attention any other way, I completely understand her reaction to a makeup artist's claim that he can make any woman interesting if not beautiful:

"But I am interesting. It's beautiful I want to be."

Yeah, Nora. I know.

*****

Nora Ephron knew about interesting at the macro and micro levels. She writes about the famous and influential people of the time--Helen Gurley Brown, Bill Blass, James Beard and Craig Claiborne, Jacqueline Susann--and in a sentence or two you understand something essential to their personalities; and then in just another sentence or two, you see how they turned their particular preoccupations into hugely influential cultural trends. For better or for worse (it's hard for me to think of Helen Gurley Brown's influence as anything but disastrous, though I believe that she sincerely thought that she was helping young women), Ephron's subjects shaped the popular culture in which I came of age.

This has always been an interesting topic to me. With unusual prescience that allows them to see a shift in tastes or beliefs just before it materializes, some people just know what will be in or out a few minutes before the rest of us catch on. Or by sheer force of personality, they make a trend happen, instead of just predicting it. I'm a quiet person most of the time (what Helen Gurley Brown would have called a "mouseburger") and I also tend not to notice things until they're utterly impossible to miss. A stylish person can explain to me why a particular look is good or bad, and I'll understand; but even if I had the ability to envision and create a new fashion or a new literary trend or a new direction in American cuisine, I don't think that people would follow my lead. And that's OK. Cultural icon status is too much responsibility for one person to bear.

*****

Now it's Veterans' Day; another unearned gift of a day off . At 4:38 PM, it's almost dark. It's cold and heavily overcast, so I can't see the sun setting; just the light gray solidly cloudy sky with an etching of dark gray almost-bare trees. The weekend is pretty much over, but that's OK, too. I squeezed as much out of the three days as I could, and now it's time to work again.

*****
Wednesday night. I'm watching hockey; the Washington Capitals (of course) vs. fucking Winnipeg. An uneventful game thus far. Not so the weather. It's November 14 and we're already bracing for the dreaded, God-forsaken, bane-of-the-Northeast's-existence "wintry mix," my least-favorite two-word combination other than "password reset." It's going to be a long winter. Snow in November is neither interesting nor beautiful.

*****
The Capitals lost. They're very inconsistent this year. It's Thursday now. Icy pavements and sleet tapping on the windows and temperatures hovering just below freezing. I'm not ready for this dead-of-winter nonsense in the middle of November. The January inertia is descending and it's not even Thanksgiving.

On the other hand, the weather forced cancellation of an evening meeting that I hadn't been looking forward to, and now I'm finished everything I needed to do today at the delightfully early hour of 8:30 PM. Even winter has its consolations. I'm awash in free time, so I'll find something new to read. If I don't have anything coherent to say next week (because why should next week be different from any other), then at least I'll have book reviews, weather reports, and sports highlights. You've been warned

Auto-didact

I finished the Evita book, and learned more than I needed to know about the Perons and the whole sorry history of 20th century South American dictatorships. After Evita died, Argentina's political climate shifted so abruptly that exile for Juan Peron alone wasn't enough. Evita's body was also exiled, hidden in a graveyard in Italy under a false name, where it remained for nearly 20 years. Eva and Juan Peron were both objectively terrible people, and yet they inspired fanatical devotion among millions of followers. It was an instructive read.

*****

Anyway, I'm working my way through the Excel course, and it's also very instructive. I'm learning a lot. For example, did you know that you can turn an Excel rectangle into a square, or an oval into a circle? I don't know why you can't just start with a square or a circle. That's a question for Bill Gates.

I am a person who writes and thinks in mostly words.  I look at a graph or a map or a diagram, and I have to methodically work my way through it before I can actually understand it. A quick glance at a picture doesn't help me to grasp an idea, unless I think backward step by step, relating each color or shape to the information that it represents.

I realize that this is just the opposite of what is supposed to happen and that many people find it very easy to absorb information when it's presented in a visual format. They're the same people who never get lost, and who can always cut the right-size sheet of wrapping paper just by looking at the gift they need to wrap. They're the people who always say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And maybe it is. But I like a thousand words.

But now that I'm learning more about how to use Excel, I'm seeing that a particular type of visual display can actually change the way you understand something, You'd think I'd have known this already, but I didn't. A histogram or a tree map or a pareto chart or a pie chart or a column and line chart all illuminate data in different ways. I thought that one chart vs. another was a stylistic choice--flats or high heels; a dress or a skirt and sweater. But it's more than that. It's more like the difference between wearing shoes and not wearing shoes-- you'll understand your feet differently shod or barefoot.

*****
With Evita and the crazy Peronistas out of my hair (and good riddance), I needed something new to read. So I'm reading Nora Ephron's Wallflower at the Orgy. It reminds me of what I thought my life was going to be when I was young.

The first essay is about the first generation of what were once called "foodies," and it made me remember a line from "When Harry Met Sally," when Carrie Fisher tells Bruno Kirby "Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s;" and of course the reason that I remembered that line was that Nora Ephron wrote it.

Before this, I'd never read Nora Ephron's work. It's tempting to compare her with Joan Didion, and there are definitely parallels. But when you read Nora Ephron, you feel that she was fully immersed in and engaged with the world that she's writing about, the world of well-educated and attractive and stylish young people in New York City in the 1970s. She can claim to be a wallflower, just blending into the background, but there's nothing distant or disengaged about her writing.

Didion, on the other hand, remained at a cool and impenetrable distance and even though she was also fully immersed in a very rarefied and stylish world, she seemed removed from it somehow. But she is mercilessly honest about herself in her writing. I haven't read enough of Nora Ephron to know if she's as brave, but I'm looking forward to a visit to New York and Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s, when people believed that a regime like Peron's was a relic of another time and another place and could never happen here.  It should be instructive.

Not a review

I don't write movie reviews. This partly because I'm not visually oriented, and partly because I don't have much to say about most movies other than "it was pretty good, I liked it." But every so often, I feel that my vast reading public is eager to know what I think about the latest cinematic offerings, and I do hate to disappoint.

So I saw "Can You Ever Forgive Me" a few days ago. I don't have a star- or thumb-based rating system, so I'll just say that it was really really good. Really good. I love Melissa McCarthy. Her performance in "Bridesmaids" was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a movie, and my kids and I never tire of repeating funny lines from "Spy." Yes, I know. I'm the mother of the year.

As anyone who saw "Bridesmaids" knows, Melissa McCarthy is afraid of nothing. She looks genuinely unattractive through most of that movie, and I don't mean movie star unattractive--you know, when a beautiful actress wears very little makeup and a plain hairstyle and baggy clothes, but her perfect skin radiates with light and her plain hair shines like the sun and the baggy clothes draped over her broad shoulders and long legs make her look like the damn Statue of Liberty. No. I mean just plain, dumpy, badly dressed, stringy hair, splotchy skin unattractive.

Movie critics used to write about actors losing themselves in a role. You know what that means when you watch Melissa McCarthy in "Bridesmaids," and now in "Can You Ever Forgive Me." She plays physically unattractive women in both movies. In the former, she is brazenly confident, not for one moment acting as if she's unworthy to occupy space, like the world expects plain women to do. In "Can You Ever Forgive Me," she's very different--plain again, but her character shrinks into herself--not because she's ashamed of her looks but because she's depressed, and every movement outside the small shell that contains her expends far more energy than she has. Both characters-- the coarse, joyful, energetic Megan; and the exhausted, angry, desperate Lee-- are actual human beings.

I read a few reviews of "Can You Ever Forgive Me" before I actually saw it. The reviews all praise McCarthy for not compromising her performance to make the character more appealing. I suppose that the viewer isn't supposed to like Lee Israel, and I understand why. In addition to being a criminal, she's also worn down with anger and exhaustion, too tired to even get out of her clothes before falling into her unmade bed. Her apartment is disgustingly dirty, and her clothes are dingy and frayed. Her career is in ruins and she has no friends, only a cat. She's bitter and all but ready to give up, and not likable at all, except that I did like her. She's not the kind of person that I'd seek out as a friend, and I wanted to shake her and tell her to snap out of it, but I liked her.

Even though I'm not visually oriented, I do notice some details. When I was young in Philadelphia in the 1980s, I spent a lot of time in New York. My friends and I liked dive bars and vintage clothing stores and used bookstores. I think that the movie captured that part of New York in the 1980s. It takes place in 1991, but that's more the 80s than the 90s. That, in fact, is really key to the story, which happens in the very last moments before the Internet changed everything. The events depicted in the movie could not have happened a few years later, when people could look things up online and easily spot a forger.

*****
And here's another reason why I don't write movie reviews: I started writing this on Saturday afternoon, and it's Monday morning now, and I still have no idea where this is going.

*****
It's Tuesday night now. I voted, using a paper ballot that I marked with a pen. Yes, the ballot was then scanned by a machine, but the actual vote was written in ink on paper. It's only been 25 years or so, but no one trusts the Internet anymore.

I still have a nagging feeling that this little movie review post should also be a comment on something else, something bigger. But this is all I have right now. It's 9:50 PM on election night, so it's too late to go out and vote if you haven't already. You can watch the returns. Or you can see a movie.