Unopened Books - musings on current reads in progress

Originally published April 30, 2012

Am I the only one who approaches a new book with mixed feelings?  What if it disappoints?  What if I don’t care about the characters?  What if there are no good maps?  Sometimes I will let a book “ripen” in the stack by my bed, whiling away evenings reading the newspaper or a magazine, until I guiltily pick the book up, review the jacket, read “About the author”, take a deep breath and plunge in.

Two nights ago, I did that with The Lost City of Z by David Grann.  DBH and I are great readers of adventure/explorer non-fiction.  Z is “a tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon”.  And, after two evenings, I’m hooked.  Even the maps are good.  The explorers are suitable megalomaniacs and the Amazon jungle is deathly and uninviting. 

At the same time, I’m listening to The Tiger, A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant.  This is about the Amur tiger in the easternmost province of Russia, nestled just above China on the Sea of Hotsk.  No maps in CD book unfortunately, so I had to pull out the atlas.  Though the stars are the tigers, Vaillant craftily weaves stories around the incredible Russians, some from the West, most indigenous people, and how they survive in this completely hostile environment. Vaillant’s photo on the website reveals an extraordinary amount of chest hair for a blue-eyed blonde.  Hmmmmmm.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvIVQFw_444

Beginning a book that I listen to either from my MP3 player or in the car, does not share the risk of the unopened book.  Recorded books are to keep my mind occupied while my hands are doing other work:  driving a car, sewing, gardening, cleaning.  They make the time fly.  I still fondly remember listening to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (all 63 hours or it) while gardening in the intense Indiana heat and humidity at our home in Beverly Shores.  Yes, I did fast forward through the endless repetition of John Galt’s philosophy.

In the car, I’m listening to T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done.  Not my favorite T.C. book, but he usually takes you to a new place and perhaps a new point of view.  This one is about the battle on the California Channel Islands between the US Park Service, who want to return the islands to their original condition by eliminating all the non-native species introduced over the past 500 years by humans, and the PETA-type who are against killing any living thing, non-native or not.  As with most T.C. books, there are no real winners, a just lot of losers trying to do what they think is right. 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe resides on my Kindle.  He’s been there for about a year, as I only use the Kindle when I fly and I try to only download books in the public domain, which are free.  Last year was the 100th anniversary of the publication of UTC, so it received a bit of press and even a book written about the book.  I’d never read it.  The book is largely written in slave dialogue which makes it a bit of a struggle.  The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, used that same technique and was offputting to many readers. 

Hilary Mantel just wrote a small article in the Review section of the Saturday WSJ about the language challenge of writing books set in the 16th century.  Her books (Wolf Hall, winner of the Booker Prize) cover the royalty, the serfs, the servants, Brits and foreigners.  In the 16th century, written English was emerging.  Educated men and women wrote and spoke Latin.  Her challenge is to create a language understandable to the modern reader that still feels somewhat evocative of the age depicted.  Evan Connell does an excellent job of crafting 13th century “speak” in his book, Deus Lo Volt, the memoire of a Crusader.  It’s just strange enough that the reader has to “work” at rhythm and pace of the words, but not so challenging that you are put off by the effort.

So many books…so little time.  

©annboland.com 2013

Sins of the Mother

Originally posted May 5, 2012

Little ol’ Tucson is finally getting big time theater – and it isn’t coming from Broadway in Tucson with their road shows.  For years, DBH (Dearly Beloved Husband) and I have been avid theater goers.  Not the several times a year variety, but several times a month.  We call it “toad kissing”.  We are happy to see the no-name performers and writers to find the prince that sometimes lurks in a theater with no curtain, folding chairs and “Pay what you can Thursdays”. 

Beowulf Alley Theatre has had a rough season.  Play selection has been spotty, acting inconsistent within a production, direction and timing off in plays that require spot-on action.  But we have stayed with it – mostly because we sometimes find princes.

Sins of the Mother by Israel Horovitz is a prince.  The production features four talented performers – one of them wickedly so, Ken Beider.  His role is twin brothers, cast asunder by the sins of their brawling parents.  No, he does not play them simultaneously through the miracle of digital imaging.  One brother, central to the first act, is murdered.  The other brother carries the second and third acts, resolving and dissolving the family feud. 

The situation, pacing and dialogue reminded me of Arthur Miller, though Horovitz says he is strongly influenced by Samuel Beckett (remind me to see more Beckett).  There is a lot of drama, humor, violence, a few strong words, but mostly an engrossing unfolding of tragedy – and mysteries that are not all neatly tied up by the end of the evening.

We also enjoyed returning to a favorite downtown eatery, The Hub.  Great food, excellent service, very reasonable prices and two blocks from the theater.  There were four in our party and we fell upon the “French fries (cooked in lard, of course) topped with blue cheese, served au jus” for our appetizer.  $7.  Magnificent.  I always get their souped-up hot dog, served with home-made sauerkraut and lean pastrami.  DBH chose to dine solely on mac and cheese with bacon.  There are no “cheap and cheerful” beers at The Hub (like a Bud Lite), only brew-pub styles.  I’m not too fond of most of these, as I enjoy lagers.  Our waiter recommended (and brought me a taste of) Scrimshaw, a pilsner on draft from North Coast Brewing in CA.  Delicious.  The Hub also make over 30 flavors of ice cream.  We ended our meal with a taste of Bourbon Brickle. 

©annboland.com 2013

A Night at the Opera - five of them, actually

I’m writing this from Champaign, IL where our flight from Santa Fe is taking on more gas and waiting for a huge storm front to pass through Chicago.  Though, after looking at Weather.com, I’m not sure we will be getting out of here any time soon.  I’m in no rush, but pity the many passengers who are (or were) making overseas connections out of O’Hare.  Pass the time by reading Salamon Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and working on cross-stitch and writing a blog entry.

Five operas in five nights…too good an opportunity to miss.  In 2011, Ed and I made our first visit to the Santa Fe Opera.  I fell head over heels in love with the quality of the productions, the facility and Santa Fe is a city we both enjoy.  Two weeks during their month and a half season, they run all five opera in their repertoire on consecutive nights – so you can do it all in a week.  My cousins, Mervin and Reade White-Spunner from Mobile, AL are also opera fans, so we rented a house together.  They took a more conservative route with three operas during the week.

Opera I – Tosca.  Magnificent!  Huge voices for Scarpia and Tosca, and Cavaradossa was a great tenor.  Interesting staging, with the main stage as the huge unfinished painting, so everyone was walking over it throughout Act I.  While others were outraged at the untraditional staging, it did not detract from a sterling performance.

Opera 2 – The Pearl Fishers -  George Bizet.  Not Bizet’s best, but a lovely opera, even though no one dies. 

Opera 3 - Rossini - Maometto II.   Excellent, rarely produced opera.  Scenes of war enhanced by live thunder storm.  Most everybody dies at the end of this one.

Opera 4 - King Roger - Szymanowski.  Rarely performed and who knows why?  Etherial combination of choral, orchestra and individual performers.  Surely should be on more opera calendars as it represents a “modern” opera that is inoffensive to traditional ears.

Opera 5 - Arabella - R. Strauss – All costumes and settings in tones of gray and beige.  And the opera itself was gray and beige – beautiful music, but a snoozer.  Again, no one dies.

©annboland.com 2013

Radium Girls by D. W. Gregory

Originally published April 23, 2012  Beowulf Theater, Tucson

How many times have we moistened a small print brush by wetting it in our mouths?  Maybe not so many times as an adult, but likely often as a child.  Shortly after the turn of the 19th century, radium, a key component of a “glow in the dark” paint called Undark, was used to illuminate watches and controls on machines used in WWI.  Employees of US Radium, mostly women war-workers, were encouraged by their employer to moisten their paint brushes in their mouths to obtain the very fine point needed for the numbers and letters they were painting.  Most of these women later developed radium poisoning, suffering terrible disfigurement of the mouth and jaw and eventually dying.

US Radium hid the poisonous nature of radium from their employees, even though they were so aware of its devastating effects that management used lead shields when handling the paint.  Radium Girls is a sad and effective play about several of these women who filed a class action suit against US Radium, eventually getting a small settlement to offset medical bills, but virtually nothing was paid to them.  This proved to be one of landmark cases that eventually led to worker protection on the job.  Read more about it at http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/

This is an important play for young people to see who were born in the OSHA world and don’t know about the workers who gave their lives and the employers who took their lives seeking the almighty dollar.  It is one thing to knowingly take a risk in personal or work endeavors.  It’s another when your employer egregiously deceives you regarding the risk of your job. 

Beowulf did a nice job with the play.  I admire their productions, as all on stage and behind stage are volunteers.  It takes a lot of dedication and energy. 

©annboland.com2012

War Horse: the movie, the book, the play

I love horse stories.  There wasn’t a Marguerite Henry book in the 50’s that I did not read many, many times over.  King of the Wind was my favorite, closely followed by Misty of Chincoteaque.  Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse was originally published in the UK in the 80’s and I did not hear of it until it was adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, featuring the Handspring Puppet Company as the horses.  And now adapted to a movie from Steven Spielberg.  I have now read the book and seen both productions. 

I loved War Horse the movie.  It is memorable and remarkable.  Young people need to learn about war and death and horror and we adults need to be reminded of it.  The most popular vehicle for those images today is video games – what do you imagine our young people are learning from those?  This story of a horse, trained, loved and lost by a boy who becomes a soldier and the horse that also becomes a soldier in WWI, teaches all of us.  The book is better than the movie, though both are schmaltzy and predictable.  Most great stories are.  I plan to discuss it with my great nieces and nephews - the war, the cruelty to animals, to humans and how it continues to this day.  Well done, Spielberg.  You have made a great vehicle for learning.

But the play – with the huge puppet-horses, attacked all senses.  There was no question that the puppets were real horses – they were “more real” that horses, jerking at tufts of grass, flicking their tails, snorting, and galloping right off the stage.  The production was alive with puppeteers, never concealed, but visibly manipulating their puppets until you realized there were not two entities involved, but one – the goose, the bird.  And the horses with six and sometimes eight puppeteers who became the one horse. 

The play is more horrifying than the movie – when the animal dies, the puppeteers die as well.  And, to fit the abbreviated stage length, large bits of the story are left behind.  But these were parts that more humanized War Horse, and we are left with a more visceral taste of the horrors of war.

Other memorable books about The Great War came rushing to mind as I reflected on this trio:

Johnny Got His Gun – a didactic, horrifying novel by anti-war activist and black-listed author Dalton Trumbo

Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road – a trilogy by Pat Barker about the psychological effects of war.  The Ghost Road won the Booker in ’95.

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks haunting novel about sappers – the men, mostly British coal miners, who tunneled under the trenches in WWI.

Goodbye To All That – Robert Graves autobiographical recollections of WWI, some of which is reflected in the Pat Barker trilogy. 

©annboland.com 2012