my tragic right hip

I forgive you Sarah Waters. Not that you probably care, but after hating Tipping the Velvet so very much, I was happy to enjoy The Night Watch with the delicious passion I felt towards Fingersmith.

I forgive you too for writing a book 470 pages long and, I suppose, for my own audacity in thinking that I could finish it in one day for my Book A Day challenge. But the prose is so easy-going, the story, about Londoners during the war, so addictive, that I left television behind for the evening and kept on reading.

I even forgive you for telling me the story backwards, for starting in 1947 with the end and then doling out the background in the subsequent sections from 1944 and 1941.

But most of all, I thank you for showing me a London that my grandmother lived through, bombs, air raids, night watch wardens, soldiers on leave, love stories told in the dark, torches, and terror.

It’s a truly great piece of fiction.

Ahem, and it’s been an industrious sort of morning (now afternoon) for sure. I finished up the final edits of my two latest Classic Starts. And have also finished yet another task from the list:

12. Clean the kitchen cupboards (see #10).

Done and done!

I watched this abysmal film on Sunday afternoon. Holy crap it’s poo. Awful script, painfully bad acting by usually good actors and chalked full of trite, predictable situations. What’s more embarrassing? I actually watched it to the end. Shame on me. And shame on Alicia Silverstone and Queen Latifah, they’re so much better than this dreck.

Oh, and I didn’t watch any movies on Monday, so that means I’ve got two, count ’em, two extra ones stored up! Maybe I’ll indulge today…

What a busy day I had yesterday! As I’m living and dying by the list these days, here’s item 16:

See the eye doctor (appointment made), family doctor (appointment made), naturopath (appointment made) and osteopath (appointment not made yet…). This is all in the goal of spending the next 2.5 weeks getting as well as I humanly can get in the time I’ve got to myself.

Yesterday I saw the family doctor to talk about the strange prednisone-crazy anxiety attacks. She was very kind to me about it all and just wanted to make sure that the super-fancy disease doctor knew that I was starting to feel a bit weepy from the stupid meds. Then she was kind enough to give me some little pills that calm me right down. The last thing I need is to start freaking out all the time, rev my immune system up even more and then have the disease get even worse. Oh, and I’ve now made not one but two appointments with the osteopath, so cross that off too!

Then I walked all the way from the hospital up to Bloor Street just so I could knock this one off the list:

6. Buy a good pair of walking sneakers for the better weather soon to arrive.

Done and done!

By then it was time to take the subway to see the naturopath, who I haven’t seen in two years. That’s how much my life had sort of gotten away with me…anyway, it was great to see her and she’s going to help me work on my diet and other homeopathic stuff. I see her again once more before I go to back to work. It’s a great start, I think.

My one true goal is to be much better prepared for the toll that working takes on me in terms of living with the disease. If I can get super-organized by the time I go back, then I won’t feel like I’m wasting my life away when I get home and am too tired to do anything except watch television.

Oh, and there was this great quote that I forgot in my post yesterday about The Good Life. It’s kind of pretentious, as Corinne is reading Plato to her lover, Luke, while they’re off cheating on their respective spouses, but I liked the sentiment:

“…any single book is the instantiation of a kind of Platonic form—the ideal, the creation of an author, which exists independent of the physical object. And here they sit on the shelf: The ideal’s latent until we pick it up and connect ourselves with the mind of a man or a woman who may long be dead. And, in the case of a novel, with a world that never actually existed.”

Just something to think about today as I go about slicing and dicing the list!

Jay McInerney’s latest book The Good Life sets a love story against the backdrop of 9/11 New York. The novel’s central relationship between two middle aged people having affairs outside their own unhappy marriages portends the very real and very modern changes that affected New York after the wake of the terrorist attacks. It’s not a story of young love, but rather true love, which is an interesting point of view.

Yet, as much as a reader wants this novel to be about 9/11, it’s really not, and I think that’s kind of a shame. The cataclysmic event remains a setting, and an adept one at that, but there’s a sense of emotional depth missing, which sort of ruined the book for me. There’s none of that lingering Rescue Me psychological meltdowns among the rich and famous New Yorkers depicted in The Good Life. There’s none of the celebration of New York found in Sex and the City and the book reads more like Bonfire of the Vanities (a novel I hated) then I would have liked.

McInerney’s a good, lyrical writer, with long, luscious sentences, but he relies on repetitive phrases and stereotypical characters too much. The idea of “the good life” at once challenged and then ultimately revered throughout the novel comes across as a bit vain and even self-indulgent. I found it hard to care about the hearts of the two main characters because, quite simply, I didn’t care about them. There’s a bit of sloppiness to the novel too, with characters introduced at critical times and never brought up again, and situations explored but never truly resolved.

But mainly, I didn’t like the female lead, Corinne. I thought she was actually kind of ridiculous and a lot of her dialogue was utterly unbelievable. The male lead, Luke, was more interesting and the novel might have been more successful if it hinged entirely upon him, although that would mean putting up with his absolutely annoying wife, Sasha. Just tying a love story to the events of 9/11 isn’t enough. I kept thinking: what is this book about? The vapid nature of the rich and famous or how hard it is to change when you’re at a stage of life where there are dire consequences (broken marriages, children, career changes). But really, because there’s no emotional depth to the characters, the truly emotionally charged situation they find themselves in is kind of redundant.

Give me Denis Leary any day.

(And thank goodness I finished the Book A Day challenge today, it was tough!)

So, I didn’t end up watching a movie yesterday, which might be a good thing. I was too captivated by Intuition. And I had to go to a family function thing last night that left me out of the house during prime movie watching times. So I’m giving myself permission to watch two movies one day this week…and I’m not sure what day that might be, but I’m guessing Tuesday, when all the new films show up at Rogers. Ah, my life is so predictable and somewhat pathetic, but I’m resting dammit, I’m resting!

Intuition, Allegra Goodman’s absolutely fascinating novel about the world of cancer research, has received such good reviews that I was afraid it might not live up to my own expectations. How wrong I was. A wide, sweeping tale of how a team of cancer researchers at a lab in Cambridge make a startling discovery only to have it followed by crippling accusations of fraud, Intuition isn’t just a book about science, but of the interpretation of science. The book tells an elegiac tale of how science, regardless of method, madness and the push for results, remains a remarkably human conquest.

The lab, run by two headstrong people, pure scientist and overt genius Marion Mendelssohn, and Sandy Glass, a bombastic, brilliant oncologist, employs a dedicated number of postdocs toiling away at the seemingly endless quest to discover more information about cancer. When a bright but disorganized postdoc named Cliff starts to show dramatic results in terms of one of his experiments, the entire lab reels in the glory of the findings. Yet, when Robin, Cliff’s volatile, yet noble, girlfriend (then ex-girlfriend) questions his research, a wave of controversy engulfs every single person it its wake. No one comes out the other side unscathed.

Goodman’s rich and fascinating book engulfed me in the same way. The science in the novel isn’t so dense that it’s impossible to understand or follow; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. And I love how the whole book sort of sets out the argument that science itself, despite its very definition, is not infallible. It’s one hell of a captivating novel, and I’m sincerely glad that I managed to finish it for the Book A Day challenge.

Thankfully, someone, somewhere has finally acknowledged that Joan Clark’s An Audience of Chairs is award-worthy. In all seriousness, it was the very best book I read last year and I sincerely think that she’s one of Canada’s most underrated authors.

In fact, I’d even go out on a limb and say that this book should (if there’s any justice in the world) become part of the canon, to be read after The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries, and then dissected for its absolute brilliance of character and impassioned story. Do yourself a favour and read it. I’ve recommended it to so many people and I have not had a dissatisfied customer yet.

I Faux-Voed Dot The “I” from TMN the other night because it stars Gael García Bernal, and damn, I’d watch him in just about everything. When I looked at it on the IPG, it screamed “ADULT FILM” in brackets, so I felt a bit dirty putting quasi-porn on the fancy new TV machine. Well, only for a second, because he’s so hot…oh, wait, what was I stalking about?

Annnywaaay, it’s a little indie movie about this crazy, self-obessed filmmaker who shoots a reality movie wherein one of the main characters (Carmen, played by Natalia Verbeke) doesn’t know she’s involved. There’s a boring, predictable love triangle, and a boring, predictable outcome. It’s kind of a silly movie, but I sort of liked the statement that it made in terms of examining how reality television has impacted popular culture. It’s just too bad there wasn’t really anything fresh or new in the film.

And the supposedly “ADULT FILM” aspect? Oh, so tame, I’m guessing that no one over at the TMN rating committee has even seen Y tu mamá también. Now there’s a film worth have something in block caps on the IPG. Ahem. Is it hot in here?

I watched this film on Thursday, and then that evening I went to see V For Vendetta, but I don’t consider that cheating, if only because when I thought up the Movie A Day challenge, it was to curb the amount of time I spent in front of the boob tube, so I think I’m still doing okay.

Regardless, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio is the story of a mid-1950s housewife who raises her large brood of kids up out of poverty by winning jingle contests. Based on Terry Ryan’s memoir (one of said 10 children) of the same name, it’s a saccharine film of the hard knock life and eternal optimism of the main character, Evelyn Ryan. Julianne Moore plays the lead, and she’s good (but because she’s always good and not because the role is particularly challenging and/or interesting). But on the whole, the film was more like a movie-of-the week than a feature film. I’d give it a six out of ten.