Dough - and The 100-Foot Journey

We caught up with a 2015 movie last night called (simply) Dough. As in cash, of course, and in actual dough for baking.

It's a story about an elderly Jewish baker in London whose business is losing customers and money. The shops on either side are either owned or being bought out by an unscrupulous former 'barrow boy.' Through various circumstances a young African Muslim boy becomes the Jew's apprentice baker and things begin to turn around. Of course there are difficulties and troubles along the way. 

It's a comedy, for the most part, and the kind of necessary violence in it is kept to a minimum. 

A number of critics have pooh-poohed the film as being predictable (it is, as much as any film might be), and because it doesn't tackle the real issues of what might be involved in a Jew and a Muslim working together. For these critics, things are too simple. 

Of course they are. It's a comedy, not a film by Ken Loach or one of his ilk. Of course there are improbabilities, and even a considerable loophole in the plot - if you stop and think about it later. But there's also considerable joy in places, warmth, and some well-performed characters, especially Jonathan Pryce as the baker. Jerome Holder is the African immigrant, and I found his performance full of contrasts; he was well able to stand up to the more seasoned actors around him, such as Pauline Collins, as the recently-widowed landlady of the baker's shop, and Phil Harris and Ian Hart (neither of them chosen for their good looks) as the two villains. 

It's not a film that'll change the world. It's a feel-good movie, but seemingly many critics these days think that feel-good movies shouldn't be allowed to stand alongside the blockbusters, the Marvel comic adaptations, the deeply serious art movies. And the foreign movies, including the foreign comedies - wait, most of those are also feel-good movies, but they have subtitles...!

You can see Dough on Netflix.

21.6.17 Also on Netflix is The Hundred-Foot Journey. 

It's the story of an Indian family of cooks making good opposite a Michelin star restaurant in a relatively small town in France. They manage to do this in spite of Helen Mirren being the owner of the French restaurant, a place where 'classic' food is served. There should be no contest, except that one of the sons of the Indian restaurant happens to be a cooking genius.

I'd avoided seeing this previously because it got poor critical reviews. But it turns out to be another feel-good movie, beautifully filmed (the food looks wonderful, and the mouth waters) and well-acted. The script might be a bit undercooked, but the overall effect is enjoyment and delight.

There are some oddities: the French characters often speak French at the beginning of a scene but then wind up shifting into accented English. The Indians speak accented English throughout (though of course with a different accent). Both the restaurants are well-out of town: you wouldn't walk to either of them, yet they both have a good clientele.

Anyway, relax and enjoy it. Some films exist for no other reason.

More lasting than themselves

I'm writing notes for a programme for the ladies' choir I conduct. Something that strikes me over and over again is how often a published but extremely minor poet, a poet who is now all but forgotten (except perhaps on Wikipedia), has managed to survive longer into the future than might otherwise have been the case, because one or two of his or her poems were set to music. By a much more famous composer.

The songs I'm thinking of are mostly from the British art song period - from the very late 19th century into the first few decades of the 20th, but the same thing applies to much German lieder. The composers are remembered, and there's information about them online - often at length. But the poets are almost entirely forgotten, in spite of having produced reams of poetry, or twenty or thirty novels, or various other writings in their lifetime. And even if the poets are still visible online, their work is forgotten: a mere list of names of books that few libraries would have copies of.

Billy Collins wrote a delightful poem called Marginalia, about the sorts of things that people scribble in the margins of books. In one stanza he writes:

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated the page -anonymous men hitching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. 

Those last two lines are apt for what I've written above: like those Irish monks, the names of the poets would be forgotten if it wasn't for the vessel, the composer (or perhaps the song), being more lasting than themselves. 

Reading kids' books

I read kids' books quite often, and by kids' books I don't mean those aimed at any particular age group but ones ranging from delightful full-colour picture books to books that just come in just under the young adults' age range. I've read some YA books too, but usually they're romances or gloomy apocalyptic things, and I'm not so strung out about those.

I had a real go at Diana Wynne Jones' books in 2011, when I read eight of them (they vary in quality but are always imaginative). I read a couple more earlier this year. Her books are in the same kind of fantasy genre as mine, though of course, so far, she's been considerably more successful than me in terms of a wide readership and lots of sales.

However, in the last month I've read a couple of other books I'd like to mention. The first is Speed. Speed is a word with several meanings of course, and Grant uses that ambiguity in her title and in her book. But it's also something of a speed read, because she piles on the angst and the action. I'm not sure if anyone's yet invented an equivalent of the phrase 'page-turner' for e-books, but whatever the correct phrase is, it applies to this book, which I read on my Kindle.

It's probably aimed at young teens: the hero was around 14, if I remember rightly, and proved to be a pretty tough character by the time he'd got himself through dealing with his parents dying and lying policemen and houses burning down. This book is by the Kiwi writer, Dawn Grant (although she writes under D C Grant). It's the first in a series and I wrote a brief review on Goodreads: The book races along at a great pace with the young hero gradually getting himself deeper and deeper into difficulties. Along the way there's a good deal about coping with grief as well as making the right decisions even if they may cost you your life. 

The second book was one I finished today. It starts off a bit more slowly than Speed, is aimed at a slightly younger age range, and is written by someone living here in my home town, someone I haven't met face-to-face but have corresponded on email with. I'd written to her husband on a few occasions - he writes a column in the ODT called WordWays - and it was he who introduced me to his wife and told me about her book. 

This author is called Beatrice Hale, and she's written an exciting adventure called Ice Escape. (You can see my review on Goodreads here.)  This book has two young narrators, both boys, and while initially it's a bit of a puzzle as to why the second narrator is there, it soon becomes evident that the two lads' lives will connect. 

The story is about a family embarking on a long flight together, on a flying boat. It's set in the 1920s and their adventure is meant to take them around the world. Of course, this being an adventure story things don't quite according to plan. The characters are straightforwardly-drawn, and the adventure itself is exciting enough to make you keep turning pages again. But the interesting thing is that a great deal of information about flying, and living in a perilous situation, and being rescued, and working on a fishing boat is included. There's no sense that it's there just because the writer thinks it's interesting, but because it's integral to the story. 

I probably won't write a thriller like Speed or an adventure story like Ice Escape. But each book you read shows you better how to write your own - quite apart from the sheer enjoyment involved in sharing the adventures of fictional characters. As poet Billy Collins writes in One Life to Live: 
...this is the only life I have and I never step out of it, 
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel...

Ten of the best

There's a recent article in The Guardian on the Dave TV Channel's pick of the best and worst books of the 21st century. These kinds of best/worst lists are always a bit of a mix, and can mean anything or nothing.  Still it's worth a look to see what got on the best list. 

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
• We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Pompeii by Robert Harris

I've read the first five, as well as Pullman's book.  The other three have all been made into movies, the only one of which I've seen is The Help, which was great entertainment, with some social commentary mixed in. Pompeii, by Harris, I've never heard of.  Which means nothing...or anything.

I can't say that I remember Order of the Phoenix being particularly striking amongst the Potter books, though by that time things had got very dark in Potterland, and were a long way from the relatively cheery opening title in the series. However, by way of comment about Rowling's series, I still think they're immensely readable and generally better than the movies (with the exception of number 7 in the movies, which managed to make the long haul in the centre of the book a good deal more interesting). 

Life of Pi I found disappointing, ultimately. Its pseudo religious angle didn't grab me at all...in fact made very little sense, and often seemed unconnected to the rest of the story. There are brilliant moments scattered throughout the book, a great deal of stuff that makes the stomach kind of queasy, and a curious ending which not only seems to me to let the author off the hook, but to make what has already been a pretty grim story into one that's far worse.  I haven't seen the movie, since I read the book only a month before the movie came out, and didn't fancy facing everything all over again quite so soon. A bit of distance between a book and a movie helps.

The Time Traveller's Wife, for me, was overlong; it never quite knew when to stop. The fantasy idea was great, and well executed, for the most part, but there was just too darn much of it.

The Hunger Games. I saw the movie before I read the book, but reading the latter made me realise just how much the moviemakers assumed their audience would already be aware of. Popular and all as this book is, and full of suspense (even after seeing the movie), it nevertheless is a curiously disturbing book, as I wrote back in January.

The same can be said of The Amber Spyglass - not only does Pullman take the disturbing elements of the first two books in the trilogy into previously unknown territory, he continues to get all spiritual in a very peculiar way. He's already had a fair go at the 'Church' in the first two titles, but here he tries to imagine a kind of after-death world where achieving nothingness is seen as a relief.  Well, maybe it is for Pullman. I disliked it intensely, and disliked even more his negative caricature of God (and Pullman's claims that he's basing this on Milton's great poem, Paradise Lost). I wrote briefly about this back in 2005, and haven't changed my mind about what I thought then...

I wrote about Atonement only a few weeks ago. I'd seen the movie a couple of years back, and thought it very good; the book was also very good, with a few reservations.  It deserves to be on this list, as no doubt do dozens of others that are better in every respect than most of the other nine titles...

But you can't fit all the best books into ten slots, so!

Tenors and Judith Collins

It's a curious thing that we have so many touring singing groups who consist of nothing but tenors.  Is there something special about the tenor voice that makes it prime?  The trend perhaps started with the Three Tenors (men who really could sing, and didn't just do classical-pop), but since then we've had a rash of tenors in various numberings: Eleven Tenors, Seven Irish Tenors, and so on.  Where are the Sixteen Sopranos, the Bunch of Basses and the Eight Altos?

Judith Collins is perpetually in the news these days, usually for the wrong reasons.  As Minister of Justice you hear her talking very little about actual justice, and a great deal about what Judith Collins thinks.  As per today, when she ranted on about the lack of consensus amongst the politicians regarding changes to MMP:
"I'm not actually a party leader. I am the Minister of Justice, and if they need me to organise the kumbaya sessions of party leaders to get together and work out what it is they agree on, then there's something very wrong.
"My job is to receive the information and see if we can get a bill together.
"If these parties want changes they should come and talk to each other. It's not my role for bloody sake.
"I'm not their nanny.
"I'm not in charge of these other parties, I'm not in charge of eight parties in Parliament, plus the independent Brendan Horan."

I'm not sure what a 'kumbaya session' is, nor am I familiar with the expression 'for bloody sake.'  And doesn't the second statement contradict the first?  She doesn't want to organise the parties, yet she says her job is to receive the information and get a bill together.  Well, how is she going to get that to happen unless she organises the parties?  Time for a new Minister of Justice, methinks, one who actually knows the meaning of the word.

Breach and Mr Nobbs

Last night we watched a movie, Breach, which I felt I'd seen before, yet I didn't have any memory of how it panned out, or even of Ryan Phillipe in the main role.  Yet in an early scene, when Phillipe meets up with Chris Cooper (at his snake-eyes best) I was sure I'd seen it some other time, and there were scattered moments throughout that seemed familiar.  Perhaps it had been on TV somewhere, and I'd caught it out of the corner of my eye while I was supposed to be paying attention to something - or someone - else.

Anyway, it's a well-cast piece (the impecable Laura Linney is in it too) and though it might occasionally be felt to be just a little too slow for a thriller, it certainly has some suspenseful moments.  Taken at its own slightly curious pace, and with the cast all in top form, this is worth watching.  It's based on the true story of the uncovering of one of the US's top spies: Robert Hanssen.  While working for the FBI, he was systematically giving away the country's secrets to the Russians.  Cooper plays a man full of religious hypocrisy, mistrustful of everything that might be slightly out of kilter, and bullying in his treatment of his subordinate (Phillipe).  Phillipe is the new boy on the block who helps the old-timers in their task of bringing Hanssen to justice.  While playing the part of a clumsy, unintelligent youngster - for Hanssen's sake - he's actually having to deal with the razor-sharp mind of his superior, keeping him at bay whenever he's suspicious of anything in his very ordered world.

Another slightly slow movie - intentionally so - is Albert Nobbs.  The title role is played by Glenn Close; it's an extraordinary achievement.  The role was obviously close to her heart, since she was also involved in the script and production.  Albert Nobbs is a woman making her living as a male waiter in an Irish hotel run by an arrogant and devious woman (Pauline Collins) who claims to treat her staff well but is in fact mostly unaware of the reality of their daily lives.  She's certainly unaware - as are the rest of the staff - that Nobbs is actually a woman, and Nobbs intends to keep it that way.  As an orphaned teenager she dressed up as a man to take on a temporary job, and then found that it was economically sound to remain a 'man.'

We know from the beginning that Nobbs is a woman, of course, since we know that Close is playing her.  However, there's a wonderful moment quite early in the piece when a broad-shouldered, tall and lanky male housepainter also turns out to be a woman; she's the widow of a man who abused her until he died and she's also found it worthwhile maintaining the pretence.  These two form a friendship - Nobbs can finally talk to someone who understands - but there are other complications which I won't reveal here. 

Close is surrounded by a mostly British cast (some of whom are Irish, but the majority English) and her Cockney accent works well.  Her tight little face, her movements, her submissive approach all combine to create a wonderfully sympathetic character - it's necessary that we're sympathetic in the light of her attempts later in the film to form a relationship with one of the younger maids (Mia Wasikowska) in the hotel. 

It's a small-scale film, but one that was worth making.  

Hunger Games - the book

I noted in my last post that I watched the movie The Hunger Games on New Year's Eve.  As a result I decided to read the book, in part to satisfy some of the questions I had about the movie.  The result is that I now see that the movie often provides a shorthand version of much of the background material, and while this would be sufficient to those who've read the book, it isn't always enough for a person coming new to the story.  So it pays to read the book, which is very readable - apart from a few factors.  No doubt it would pay to read the other two stories in the trilogy before the movies of those appear (the second is in production) as well.

My main concern with the book is the same as with the movie: there's little sense amongst the teenagers who spend their time killing each other off in the bulk of the story that there's something wrong with all this. Yes, they do talk about it briefly at times, but when push comes to shove, they don't seem to have many real qualms about the killing - and that includes the heroine with the weird name - Katniss - as well as her male counterpart, the equally oddly named, Peeta.  Katniss has some qualms about killing, but it's mostly to do with those she likes. The rest are basically the enemy. Suzanne Collins, the author, gets over this to an extent by painting these enemy kids as youngsters who've grown up expecting to have an opportunity to be involved in these gladiatorial games: they've made a career out of it, as it were.  In fact, this is what they're known as collectively.  Other people, however, like Katniss and Peeta - and Rue, the twelve-year-old rather incongruously caught up in this crazy business - are the goodies, and whatever their flaws, they're always painted as the goodies. Of course Katniss has to have an antagonist, and the craziest of the 'tributes' (as the youngsters are called) is seen as bad to the bone from early on.  In fact, the real antagonists of the story, I suspect, don't really come into their own until the second or third stories; this is collectively the Capitol, one of those usefully anonymous entities who appear regularly in fantasy/sci fi.  In the book version, the Capitol barely has a personality.  In fact, the Capitol in the movie has much more of a face (as do the game controllers) than in the book, courtesy of Donald Sutherland in one of his more sinister personifications.  But even though he appears briefly several times in the movie, we still don't know the whys and wherefores of his part in the whole proceedings.  This is okay: we have two more stories in which to find out about him/them.

What's not so okay, and what seems to me to be a flaw in the book (which translates over into the movie) is the way in which Peeta is constantly being rescued by the heroine.  Now, you could say that female characters by the million have spent their allotted time in books being rescued by heroes, and you'd be right.  But Peeta, who's lacking in virtually any skills that would actually get him through the nightmare of the Games, and who constantly puts his foot in it, and who is more trouble than he's worth in terms of forcing Katniss to have to deal with him as well as the big nasty, is supposed to be the romantic lead in this story.  He has to be strong enough as a character to give Gale, the boy Katniss thinks she might be in love with (but who doesn't have any involvement in the Games) a run for his money.  But he isn't that strong a character. He's a romantic, and unless he pulls his socks up in the other two stories, he's going to find himself where he probably belongs - as number two in the romantic stakes.  I suppose it's possible that Collins sees a romantic character as being more trustworthy in the long run than a hunk.

The interesting thing is that in the movie the role of Gale, the boy back home, is played by a hunk. When you come to the story as I did, without any prior knowledge of what part he plays in it all, you wonder how he doesn't wind up as the other candidate for the Games.  The role of Peeta in the movie is played by Josh Hutcherson, who isn't a hunk, and who doesn't have the screen presence of a romantic lead, and yet he gets all the screen time.  It could be said to be a nice reversal (in more ways than one), subverting our expectations.  Whether this works will only be shown when the next two films get made.  Perhaps when I read the other two stories in the trilogy - if I do - the logic behind this will come clear.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah

I had the chance to sing George and Ira Gershwin's song, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah again yesterday at a concert.  I hadn't sung it since way back in the early 2000s, when we included it as a surprise piece in an evening of Gershwin music.  I think I probably sang it better yesterday, though that's not saying much.

It's a piece of nonsense, of course, in which the singer claims he's 'studied all the rhymes that all the lovers sing' (on the big screen) and proceeds then to give his beloved nothing but the rhymes...the rest of the song is pretty much blah, blah or, tra la la la.  

It's not actually that easy a song to sing.  I don't mean vocally, but just to make it work is quite difficult. I played around with it more yesterday than the previous time I sang it, but just to show how differently it can be interpreted, and how it may still not come across, check out these videos of people doing it.

First, Ann Hogan, a mezzo, performs it at a lunchtime recital in St Anne's Church, Dawson St, Dublin.  The accompanist is Dearbhla Collins (which is almost an ideal name to have when accompanying this song!)

In another version, we have Eleni Pantages, accompanied by Peter Walsh. 

And finally, there's the clip from the movie, Delicious, in which the song is given some context (though not much!).  Russian immigrant Sascha, played by Raul Roulien, bets the Americanized Swedish valet Jansen, played by El Brendel, that he can't make up song lyrics.  Roulien performs Blah, Blah, as a spoof of the pop songs of the era.  This one isn't on You Tube, so you'll have to go to the link on the Turner Classic Movies site. 

If you're desperate for more versions of the song, you can find a surprising number on You Tube - they vary quite a bit in quality, as you can imagine, and in interpretation...

Emergency and depression

I'd never heard of an Emergency Medical Technician until today, when I saw Emergency Medical Technician Jobs advertised.   One of the jobs is advertised this way: Responsible for the pre-hospital care of patients who are in need of this care as a result of accident or illness, which sounds to me pretty much like a person working an ED or ER situation.  Which is what my new daughter-in-law does, even though she's not called an Emergency Medical Technician, but a Physician's Assistant.  No doubt someone can inform me as to the difference between these two; I'm sure there's enough of a difference for them to be classed differently. 


Admittedly my daughter-in-law can work in non-ER situations too, so perhaps that's an element of what is different about the two roles.  


Skipping through my clippings (that bit of rhyme is kind of appropriate to what I'm about to say) I came across a description of Australian poet, Les Murray, and his fight with depression.    It comes from a review of Murray's book, Killing the Black Dog: a memoir of depression.  At the age of 50, Murray fell into a deep depression, "occasioned, he believes, by the chance comment of an old high school tormenter who came to a local reading given by Murray and who “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me 30-odd years previously.” (Murray had experienced a less severe depressive episode at the end of the 1950s.) Within days, his fingers started tingling painfully, and he later developed a sudden aversion to nicotine. He landed in an emergency room with what turned out to be a panic attack. A doctor sent him to the psychiatric ward, where his depression was diagnosed."


Ah, the panic attack.  I know these horrors well.  Murray would have up to four or five a day, as well as suffering from the “the 4 a.m. Show” in which you find “your troubles and terrors ripping into you with a gusto allowed them by fatigue and the disappearance of proportion.  I wonder why 4 am is such a significant hour for depression sufferers?   I know 4 am well, but the same process can start earlier at 3 am too.  Though I haven't suffered depression for some time, ordinary anxiety can bring on these early morning calls, when you wake with a snap and suddenly your brain is in full locomotion mode.  It takes quite a bit to get it to settle down again, although I've found that reciting old Psalms and poems I've memorised helps to distract the brain that wants to go and do something now!  The brain likes you to get up rather than lie in bed, and sometimes that's the only solution: getting up and taking a pen and writing down what is bugging you.  Writing it out of your head certainly helps. 


Another poet, Billy Collins, has an apt line regarding this in his poem Journal, where he writes:


And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it [the journal] up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Two books

While travelling to and from the States in the first couple of weeks of this year I read two books (wasn't time to read more; plus, on the way over I had a cold and didn't feel like doing anything).   One - I read this on Kindle - was Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.   The other was a book I picked up because it was going for under $5US in a bookshop at San Francisco airport.  (Of course by the time they'd added on the tax  - why don't they just include it like sane nations do? - the book was slightly over $5, which niggled my NZ equanimity a little!) This one was The Anthologist, by an author unknown to me: Nicholson Baker.  This turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable book that I finished while waiting at the airport and on the flight home (including a patch at what was, by then, about 3 am NZ time).


This is listed as a novel, and it does tell a kind of story from the viewpoint of its narrator, a self-deprecating character called Paul Chowder, a sometime poet.  Chowder's lady friend has recently left him because he just can't, or won't, get on with the introduction to his anthology of poems that rhyme.  The suspense in the book hooks on these two facets: will he get his 40-page introduction done by the deadline?  Will his lady-friend return?

But far more of the book hinges on Chowder's (or perhaps Baker's) views on poetry that rhymes, and how that's much closer to the human soul than free verse (even though he has such a writer's block that he can't write such poetry anymore).   He also offers in the process his views on innumerable poets, giving snippets from their biographies, critiques of some of their poems, the connections between different poets and how that affected what they wrote, and much more that's related to the topic.  It's a grab bag full of wit and some wisdom, some strong views and some snide ones, and numerous hilarious stories about all sorts of things, related and unrelated to the novel's 'story.'   It's thoroughly enjoyable and quite unlike any novel I've read.  The subject matter appealed to me, which helps (it's not long since I finished Stephen Fry's book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled), but Baker is so engaging in this book, whether he's pretending to be Chowder or not, that I found it hard to put it down.

The author of the other book, Alan Jacobs, is someone I follow on Twitter (his Twitter name is @ayjay).  The quotes he collects that appear on one of his blogs - More Than 95 Theses - are worth following alone, but he's also written several interesting books, including one of C S Lewis (The Narnian) that is a better biography and discussion of Lewis' works than any I've read.

His new book is a paean to the joys of reading, a discussion of whether reading is going downhill or on the rise (it's the latter), a discussion on whether it's necessary to follow slavishly through books like The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You died, or whether it's better to read on a Whim (and he explains that a Whim with a capital W is somewhat different to a whim without the capital).   He shows that reading isn't limited to those books that are important, and that in spite of what such critics as Harold Bloom say, reading Harry Potter and the like (and even trashy novels) definitely has its place.  He also talks about the fact that we have different views of the same book at different stages in our lives: what seems wonderful when we're young can be dry years later (he found Absalom, Absalom! a revelation when young, but difficult to enthuse about a couple of decades later) - or vice versa: a book that's impossible for us to read in our youth may open itself to us when we've lived longer.

He writes about abandoning books without guilt - this is something we find hard when young; it seems 'wrong' to have got so far through a book without finishing it.  (I've begun to keep note of those books I've abandoned, with an explanation as to why I didn't persevere; perhaps this helps assuage the guilt!)  And, as he says, abandoning a book at one period of your life doesn't mean you can't come back to it at another stage.

He has a wonderful section on annotating books - whether we should do it with page-turners, and why we should keep a pencil handy when reading more serious works, particularly non-fiction.   His comments here reminded me of Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia.   (Billy Collins gets a few lines in Baker's book too: a few derogatory lines, because Collins is so successful and Chowder isn't!).  He discusses why we think we need to read faster.   (A blogger wrote that Mark Driscoll, the masculinist pastor of Mars Hill Church, claims to read a book a day.   Jacobs doesn't call that reading.)   And he looks at the value of reading poetry: a poem is usually short, its measure can be grasped quickly, but it requires several readings to get to grips with it.  This re-reading (and memorising too, if you can) is valuable for our overall reading.

Reading this book on Kindle meant I could highlight and make notes as I went along.  I think I've highlighted and noted more on this book than on any other recent one, such was my enthusiasm for what Jacobs has to say.  Of course, I believe deeply in reading anyway, so he doesn't have to convert me to anything, and much of what he says here is relatively familiar territory.   It's useful to have it under one cover, as it were.  Incidentally, he's a considerable fan of Kindle himself, and offers reasons as to why it's a valuable addition to our ways of reading.

A not-so reliable wife

I read about half of A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick on Saturday night – a terribly overwrought piece redeemed only by its sudden shifts in the storyline.

I’ve also been reading Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern. I thought it would be about his filmmaking, but it’s mostly the background to the films, in the sense that he is telling us where the films came from. It’s equally overwrought – the passions, and dramas, and murderous feelings and hatreds and sex at every turn and grotesque relatives all start to get a bit much. It’s as though there was barely anything normal about his childhood.

Both books put Christianity in a place of horror – in Goolrick, Ralph Truitt's mother is forever (and I mean forever) going on about everyone else in her family going to Hell. And seemingly doing her best to send them there with her total lack of love. Bergman’s family isn’t a lot different: his father was a minister, and so everything revolves around righteous behaviour within the household – at considerable cost to the relationships. Bergman, however, seems the least righteous person in the world – at least in his growing up, and he doesn’t much improve as an adult.

I finished A Reliable Wife last night, and it doesn’t improve – pages and pages of the outworkings of lust, which I skipped because they added nothing to the story (it was like reading an overheated literary Mills and Boon). And then there’s all the guilt and horror and shame and lack of forgiveness. The only advantage in Goolrick’s writing is that you can skim most of this and lose nothing. The basic story could be told much more quickly – even the ‘subplots’ are non-starters – or else it really could have been entwined with some interesting details about other things in life! The business of the main character, Truitt, is vague, but it obviously earns millions of dollars, if the excesses of spending are to be believed. Time is so elastic that winter apparently lasts for umpteen months and a short visit to St Louis takes forever. Days are constantly passing while the characters muse, or wander, or read in the library. Truitt’s housekeeper is a miracle of a woman who can keep two houses clean on her own, even though they’re separated by several miles and no one else travels through the thick snow. The people in the small Wisconsin town kill themselves and each other brutally because ‘such things happen’ – as Goolrick’s little repeated refrain states (increasingly repeatedly as the book draws to a close).

On the plus side, there is a great deal of forgiveness in the book, as there would have to be when you consider that Truitt’s second wife lies about many things during the course of the story, and slowly begins to murder him with arsenic (and then helps him to recover again when she has a change of heart!). And there is the Truitt’s ‘long-lost’ son who refuses to stop believing his own lies and causes havoc wherever he goes.

Crikey. I had to read some of Billy Collins' poetry before I went to bed to clear my head of all the excess!

PS. Just came across something that Norman Mailer's son wrote about his father: "One of the best pieces of advice Pop gave me about writing is to learn how to say something once. Most young writers say the same things different ways. You have to choose the best." It's a pity Goolrick hadn't taken this piece of advice into account before starting his book.

Francis Collins in discussion on evolution

There's an interesting discussion on the Books and Culture site, in which Karl Giberson talks about Christianity and evolution with Francis Collins. Collins recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which "promotes the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms seeking harmony between these different perspectives."

What's interesting about this discussion is that Giberson is more than able to hold his own in terms of questioning Collins' belief in evolution, and Collins is more than able to hold his own in stating why he believes in it, and still remains a Christian. It's certainly not a discussion that covers all the ground, and no doubt sceptics on either side could look for holes and find them. Neither will it convince anyone overnight. As Collins notes: I would not want them, after one lecture, to suddenly say, "OK, you must be right; everything I've learned for the last eighteen years is wrong." I give people credit for wanting to engage the topic as opposed to shutting down and saying, "Oh, it's one of those evolution guys and I was warned about them and I'm going to stop listening right now."

The issue remains vitally of huge importance in the States, where the arguments go much deeper than whether the science has got it right or not, but the argument is also of importance here in New Zealand. Collins doesn't, in this discussion, come up with anything particularly revelatory in terms of apologetics for evolution, but it's good to hear someone of his credibility speaking in a balanced way.

Karl Giberson is the author of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (HarperOne) and executive vice-president of the Biologos Foundation. This might be a book worth checking out. Certainly I've never been convinced by anyone yet that evolution has got the goods. (Though the first review on Amazon.com doesn't do much to make me think it's actually going to help me much in the debate.)