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I watched The Devil Wears Prada last weekend. It isn’t my kind of movie, but I thought it was very well done. Meryl Streep seems completely natural in the role of Runway fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly--as she has in every role I’ve seen her in. I really didn’t have much to say about the movie, but I had to post something to start the thread.

Yeah ... couldn't get into that movie much, but now I have an excuse to talk about Star Wars. (Thanks, M.)

Star Wars fans like complaining about the prequel trilogy almost as much as they like watching the "Holy Trilogy" (maybe moreso). Problems they cite are usually superficial and actually present in the original trilogy (e.g. "Jar Jar is too screwball for the series" is ridiculous in light of the Ewoks). There's a legitimate argument against shoehorning too many references to the original trilogy (Chewbacca was a completely unnecessary addition to Revenge of the Sith), although even these were important or artistically acceptable (the scene on the Tantive IV).

But the most oft repeated complaint is that the prequels discarded the mysticism of the original trilogy in favor of political nonsense. What I'm surprised to find is that no one realizes that it was the whole point. The original trilogy had a classic hero who follows his destiny and becomes a champion of light. The prequel trilogy starts with that idea ("the chosen one") and then proceeds to screw it up with a bunch of political nonsense.

Star Wars is a love letter to the classic romantic hero.

The Sith Lord is a political genius, willing to make the hard choices for the sake of the entire galaxy. In another type of story, he would be the anti-hero, the nihilistic at-any-cost savior. He puts himself in a position to "save" the galaxy by incriminating a vile enemy, the Trade Federation, in attacking his home planet, thus earning a sympathy vote to the seat of the Chancellor (the basic plot of The Phantom Menance).

Then we meet Dooku, the political idealist that the galaxy pretty much respects for his misguided morals. He believes the Jedi are corrupt, too rigid and uncompromising, and thus feels justified in starting a war to destroy them. (Obviously, Attack of the Clones.)

Finally, we find the Jedi are caught in the political maneuverings of the Senate. They make many compromises, find corruption and the desease of the Sith in the Senate, and even consider taking it over for its own good. The Jedi themselves go from heroes to anti-heroes - and they drag their chosen one down into that abyss. Which is why he falls into the dark side. (Revenge of the Sith)

The antedote is shown in Luke Skywalker, a simple farm boy and a simple hero. He's not an anti-hero; he's the basic, romantic-era hero, which is why he can stand on the edge of the dark side without falling into it.

That's the genius of Star Wars. Now for the stupidity.

First of all, the movies do not make this easy to see. I spotted this pattern because I read the book adaptations (by Terry Brooks, R.A. Salvatore, and Matthew Stover for the prequels) which take some time to show all this political maneuvering. The best was Matthew Stover's Revenge of the Sith because that whole book was on Obi-Wan and Anakin's relationship and how the political nonsense was affecting Anakin psychologically. The movie narrative did nothing to explain it; they just went through the events, making Anakin's descent to the dark side seem abrupt and stupid.

The movies made it seem like he became a Sith to save Padme. While that was a weapon Darth Sideous used against him, it was not the actual cause. The actual cause was the lack of trust the Jedi inspired because of the compromises they made. Anakin couldn't trust the Jedi, needed to save his wife, and watched one of the greatest Jedi nearly murder one of his best friends (Palpatine). In the movies, his turn seems bizarre. In the books, it seems inevitable.

So, there's some of the thoughts I have on Star Wars (though it's far from all). I also think the Ewoks were the best way the end the series.

Oh yes, Meryl Streep rocks. Loved her in Julie & Julia, Adaptation and The Bridges of Madison County.

Thanks,M. I like this thread. I've begun writing movie reviews recently, its great to have a space here in W.S.S where I can share some. We could also come up with suggestions.

Thanks for the titles, Alex. I'll add these to my list. I've just started to collect/unearth some old ones and I've truly enjoyed the below:

Casablanca
Sunset Boulevard
12 Angry Men
Annie Hall
Rosemary's Baby
2001: A Space Odyssey
Apocalypse Now

Edward, that’s an excellent essay! You should write movie reviews for spare cash.

Ajay, I love Casablanca and Sunset Boulevard. Not many movies come to mind that even approach those.

Thanks, M, but I doubt I'd ever do that.

I agree, M. Both these are far ahead up the curve!

Wonderful review, Edward. Couldn't have encapsulated such a far reaching franchise better than that! It's been a while since I watched the entire series, but your review brought back some fond memories. Do you happen to share a similar liking to the Star Trek series?

Actually, I've watched all of five episodes of Star Trek. The original Star Trek is actual science fiction with all the heavy hypothetical philosophy that comes with it, unlike Star Wars which is just an action-adventure story with advanced technology.

Anyway, I have to watch more to really form a good opinion of it. Then I can receive another geek badge-of-honor for my collection.

I’ve seen most of the episodes of the original Star Trek several times, though it’s been quite a while since I watched them. I haven’t seen any of the subsequent Star Trek series.

True, Star Trek offers more on the science fiction front. Star Wars was always into sheer drama and fantasy. Interesting to see, how two distinct school of thoughts have co-existed and thrived, though they share a rather similar framework.

I liked what J.J.Abrams brought to the table, with the latest movie adaptation of Star Trek. It was very well done. I believe he is working on the follow up, which is due for release in 2013.

I made that point when someone bemoaned the lack of culture in America. We have both Star Trek and Star Wars. We have Dragonlance (our lesser version of Lord of the Rings) and (let me work past my probervial gag relfex) The Golden Compass. Zelda and Modern Warfare; Bioshock and Portal. The Hunger Games and the Walking Dead. Leverage and Burn Notice, Angel and Lost, Once Upon a Time and Grim ... At the very least, the geek culture is thriving in America.

I should do a review of the first Hunger Games book.

Yes, a truly diverse canvas indeed. Unfortunately, I haven't read the Hunger Games book/s. I do have the dvd of the movie though, which I plan to watch tomorrow. I've only heard of Burn Notice, I'l add these to my list! Thanks.

So, about the Hunger Games (the first book only).

This book is something of a curiosity. It's a bestseller and apparantly a "national sensation." Someone forgot to tell me, so I didn't read until everyone had assured me that it was a fantastic story. The curious part comes in the fact that I didn't hear anyone who didn't like the book, and I talked to a lot of different type of people.

I was massively underwhelmed.

Okay, it wasn't a terrible story. The narrative was decent, clear and occassionaly evocative, but nothing special. The story was nice and straightforward, reasonably exciting. The characters were all interesting ... except the protagonist.

There is the biggest problem with the book: The protagonist is the absolute least interesting character in the entire story. Her friend, Gale, raves against the Capitol, frustrated with his lack of ability to accomplish anything. Haymitch, the drunk, seems to seek redemption in helping his two assigned proteges survive the games. Peeta refuses to allow the Capitol to control him during the Games, so plans to turn the system on its head by ensuring Katniss survives rather than himself. The District Twelve tributes' costume designer is heavily hinted at having an ulterative motive.

The protagonist? Well, she takes the place of her sister as tribute, so there's ... nothing interesting about that. Seriously, it was a moment of desperation that sealed her fate: It wasn't Harry Potter slowly walking through the forest. One second to save a family member; most non-sociopathic bad guys would do this.

Before and after this event, she is simply base survival. It isn't that the character lacks definition; it's that her definition seems so pointless in the story. I get that it is a post-apocolyptic story (not really, but close enough), and those stories usually have survivalist protagonists - but those also have survivalist side characters. Katniss seems to be the only one in this book, apart from backround characters, who cares only about survival. The protagonist has the psychology of a backround character. None of the other significant characters do.

Twice in the book she deviates from this mentality: When she sings over (view spoiler)[Prue's corpse (it takes the death of my favorite character for the protagonist to do something worthwhile) (hide spoiler)] and (view spoiler)[when she suggests that both her and Peeta commit suicide to force the Capitol in letting them both live (hide spoiler)]. The second one might just be another survival tactic anyway.

Seriously, why isn't Peeta, the guy who actively seeks to rebel (quietly) against the Capitol and (view spoiler)[save the girl he secretly loves, (hide spoiler)] the protagonist? (view spoiler)[From his point of view, there would even be a shock ending when he finds out that Katniss just played being in love with him for the whole second-half of the book. (hide spoiler)] In a world of base scrambling surivival, the romantic idealist is the compelling character, not the one who's just part of the scenery.

That's a serious fracture in the story itself. Now, for some geeky reasons why the book simply doesn't make sense.

The author spends half a chapter explaining why the Capitol won the war some hundred years earlier. The explanation is stupid.

She describes the Capitol as being well-defended from intruders because it is naturally walled off by a mountain ridge that can only be crossed by a train route. Because of this and air superiority, the Capitol won the war, which is a great explanation ... if the Districts ever needed to attack the Capitol. They didn't.

The most obvious example of why this is nonsense is pretty much every war Britian has lost in the last three centuries. The American Revolutionary War was successful for several reasons: Gurrilla tactics, decentralized command, rifled barrels making actual snipers a possibility, and a limited alliance with the French. But the biggest reason why we won: We didn't need to invade Britian. (Although some Americans at the time wanted to.)

The air superiority would've give the Capitol an edge, but she already established that there were very few (maybe even just one) trains going into the Capitol's region. That make logistics horrible; all the renegades have to is blow the line and the Capitol will have a painful time feeding their troop. Air superiority supports ground troops; it doesn't replace them.

Couple that with the insane economics (each region provides one resource) and many other logical fallacies that littered the first third of the book, and the book provides more of a headache than entertainment. For those that are thinking "It's just a story, those details aren't important!" realize that the author went through the effort of explaining all these things - she should've actually made sure it even began to make sense.

That's all for now.

I agree. These are all good points. I liked the movie better. At least there weren't as many pointless explanations. I tried to read it to my little brother, for the story line and because he was interested, but it gave him a headache within the first ten chapters. We're not reading it anymore XD

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I figured it would be better for the lack of substandard explanations. I'm a geek and a student of warfare, so I would've found it interesting if it were accurate. I liked Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, which was essentially a fictional account of life in a science fiction military. Actually, it was a rather close mirror of the real autobiography Helment for my Pillow by Robert Leckie. I adored the fairly pointless explanations in Lord of the Rings.

The Hunger Games ruined that little piece of reading I typically enjoyed. That's probably why I was dead set against the rest of the book.

I'm actually glad to finally find someone else who doesn't like it much; whenever I explained this before, I usually got a mutter "Yeah, I guess, but I still think it's good."

I'm actually curious as to why so many people like it. It's a decent story, the points above notwithstanding, but still ...

I don't understand why people settle for less than mediocre.

*coughtwilightcough*

Anyway, less than mediocore is fine for some mindless fun (most of Cracked.com, although some of that stuff is brilliant), but for it to be a national hit is worrisome.

I think, ever since Twilight, there have been less good books to read. The market got flooded with Vampire book, because they were all the rage, and written in less than a year. It's ridiculous, and makes me worried for when I try to publish my book. I know that publishers look for something that is marketable, and I'm not sure mine is. :P

Anyway, have you read Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck ?

Nope. I'm in the middle of Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini and Helmet For My Pillow (Military History by Robert Leckie.

Oooh. Sounds interesting. I'll have to read them sometime :D

Okay, this it some good Dominic Deegan: http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.ph...

Haha.

Wow. This thread is one of my favorite hobbies. I LOVE reviewing movies! (I also review one new movie on my blog and hopefully will get to review more on there).

I am such a dork about it, I used to have a bunch of index cards that contained up to twenty or so reviews. Maybe if I can find them I can post them on here!

Nice review, Edward. Now, I'l think twice about reading the Hunger games series. I did manage to watch the movie last weekend. I liked it, it was fairly entertaining and didn't sag around.

Hi CJ, post them up! I seem to have lots of free time these days, so I'l read them up for sure.

Ajay wrote: "Nice review, Edward. Now, I'l think twice about reading the Hunger games series. I did manage to watch the movie last weekend. I liked it, it was fairly entertaining and didn't sag around."

*small bow* I'm going to read the other two, simply because I don't like leaving a series unfinished. (Which reminded me, I still have to read Inheritance. Perhaps I should re-read the first three and review them well.) I'm told they are less impressive than the first one, but I was also told the only redeeming quality of the Star Wars prequels was Samuel L. Jackson.

Oho, one little tidbit about Mace Windu: His lightsaber is purple because he invented the Form VII of lightsaber combat: Vapaad. Vapaad is the name of a wicked fast creature, since that's what this lightsaber transforms the user into. Unlike the other six lightsaber forms, this one is not a collection of techniques but an actual Force-technique. It channels dark energy into a blade of light.

The danger of Vapaad, for a Jedi, is that the user must allow himself to enjoy the fight to fully access its might. Mace Windu invented the form because of the darkness within himself; he transformed his inclination to the ways of the Sith into a technique of the Jedi. Sith lightsabers are red, Jedi lightsabers of mostly blue (though sometimes green and yellow); put them together and you get purple.

I had a geek fit when I figured that one out.

I wish I had something to review, but all I've read is the Little Prince, and I don't know how to describe it.

I like the tidbits, Edward! I've always liked the blue ones for unknown reasons. But I had no idea about the Force-technique! Certainly interesting, I'l try to revisit all the movies and read more.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint byMatthew Stover explains it in full detail, and he references it in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

Thanks, will check these out. I hadn't read any of the Star Wars books. I had directly jumped into the movies, which were irresistible at the time.

I just posted a passage from Shatterpoint in the "Choice Quotes" discussion. You might want to check it out to get an idea of Matthew Stover's writing.

Okay I will post one movie I "reviewed" before but I will add to it and write the rest by memory. Well I will sort of go by memory.

28 Days Later.

Genre: Horror

Rated: R

Rating: 3 and a half out of 5 stars.


Review: A former carrier rider wakes up bare in a hospital room, unaware of the terror just outside. He scouts the area of London looking for anyone to ask what had happened.
What he does find out is terrifying. . . that London was attacked by an abnormal virus (that makes the infected enraged and homicidal) and had over a period of 28 days sent London into an abandoned wasteland.
He hears, with the ones who survived, that there is a land of protection and safety far from where they are staying.
They decide to head there and find out just what may rescue them from this horrid situation. . . and then they find out the "rescue" was just not what they expected.
I am so happy to review this (this movie is one of my favorite scary movies!). This is one of those movies where a person could discuss the motives of any of the characters (especially Selena, played wonderfully by Naomie Harris). This is a smart movie. . . and though it has been criticized for making PETA people look bad as well as being labeled a zombie film (which I disagree with) it is great in my book.
One favorite thing I like to talk about is Selena and her transformation as a character throughout the movie. She starts out strong and seemingly independent. She is quick to think in critical situations and will kill others "in a heartbeat" if she thinks they are infected, friend or not. Then as she meets other people she starts to have a softer heart as she notices Hannah has a father to protect her and they are all like a family with almost nothing going wrong. . . until tragedy strikes the group and she falls apart, finally empathetic for another human being.
While the beginning part of the film might be debatable, I realize it may have been made to make the audience vulnerable. Jim wakes up (strangely) nude in a hospital room. . . and while there are no infected in the hospital viewers may be on edge because of the possible dangers going on out on the streets. To me, it seems it is like Jim is "born" into this world he did not understand. He did not know of the virus when he went into a coma, so his "awakening" is like he was ignorant to the new world, just like a child that is literally born in a world that they never lived in before.
I could talk hours about this film: the amazing cinematography that gives it a gritty realism, the acting of the "infected" themselves, the alarming terror going on in between the characterizations, and on and on.
This is a great film. The only reason I gave it a review so low is that I took it down a few points on the nudity, constant gory violence, and the sometimes gratuitous language. Great film and I recommend if you like horror see it at least once!

Yes, I just finished reading. I liked what I read and carried on reading the other posts. Especially liked message #13. I could easily envision Samuel L.Jackson speaking those lines!

Also caught a glimpse of the Dominic Deegan quote. Loved it! Is there a link where I can start from scratch and go over it completely?!

http://www.dominic-deegan.com/view.ph...

The art isn't exactly top-notch at first, but it gets better and the humor is great - as is the plot that (eventually) emerges.

CJ ... now I really want to see that. I'm sure my papa will oblige, too.

Edward wrote: "CJ ... now I really want to see that. I'm sure my papa will oblige, too."

Yay. Lol.

I enjoyed the movie too, CJ. Loved the sequence wherein, Cillian Murphy walks all alone near the Big Ben. The movie also features one of my favorite sound tracks: "In the House - In a Heartbeat".

When I finished it, I went on a spree and watched a whole lot of similar movies.

28 Weeks Later
Dog Soldiers
The Descent
Dead End
Jeepers Creepers

...

Thanks for the link, Edward!

Ajay wrote: "I like the tidbits, Edward! I've always liked the blue ones for unknown reasons. But I had no idea about the Force-technique! Certainly interesting, I'l try to revisit all the movies and read more."

I know entirely too much about Jedi lightsaber forms. Qui-Gon used the acrobatic Ataro, which Obi-Wan employed at the time until he became the master of the simplistic Soresu. Anakin favored the raw power of Shien, and Dooku studied the archaic, fencing-like Makashi.

These don't come off particularly clear in the movies (Qui-Gon doesn't jump around as much as he does in the books, although you can see the single line of attack that Dooku likes to move up and down), but they're still fun to learn about.

I'm going to take everyone on a brief detour from the movie reviews so I can get my much-needed rant about Artemis Fowl out. It's by far my favorite book series EVER. So sue me, if you didn't like it. I certainly did. ;P
I am going to demand that you all read it, if you haven't yet. Right now. Except for the seventh book. The seventh book was just horrible. Lacking in plot definition, character development, etc...
And now I'll shut up, because the rest of the series is far, far better, and right now I'm just ruining the whole image of the book series for you.
So, there you are. Hardly a rant by my standards, but Edward is probably eager to go back to Star Wars reviews. XD

Most definitely, Edward. All these discussions are spurring me on to read the books, which I will eventually.

Meanwhile, I've been hooked onto Dominic Deegan since yesterday. What a relief from the mundane!

Well, I haven't been reviewing so much as geeking out the last several posts.

The Atlantis Complex certainly had its issues. It seemed like he was just bridging over to something, though I'm not sure what yet.

Ah, have you met Gregory Deegan yet? He's my favorite character - the white-knight-mage ... cripple.

Not yet, I had been working on a poem for 'Bones' from my work desk. So I just finished a few sketches of Dominic Deegan. But will definitely check out more of it over the weekend. Also planning on catching a movie today.

Ajay wrote: "I enjoyed the movie too, CJ. Loved the sequence wherein, Cillian Murphy walks all alone near the Big Ben. The movie also features one of my favorite sound tracks: "In the House - In a Heartbeat".

..."

I like that scene too (pretty much almost all of the movie critics noted that scene as a remarkable accomplishment since it showed an eerily deserted London).
But my favorite line comes near the end involving when they are at a certain makeshift government facility and someone is about to attack Jim with a "chopper." I don't want to give too many details away since Edward might see it but when I see THAT part I want to cheer! It is cinematic art almost at its best!

Alex (Al) wrote: "Cillian Murphy has beautiful eyes."

Oh you like him? Well he is also in a film called Red Eye with Rachel McAdams. It is a fun thriller and Murphy does a surprisingly good job playing a bad guy!

M wrote: "I watched The Devil Wears Prada last weekend. It isn’t my kind of movie, but I thought it was very well done. Meryl Streep seems completely natural in the role of Runway fashion magazine editor Mir..."

The Devil's in the Details, and She also Wears Prada
       a movie review by Guy tMM. (See also my blog for additional details and images.)

M felt indifference to it, and Al dissed this movie. But I confess to having enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada — movie. I've not tried the book (and didn't know until now that there was one.) And not because it is a 'good' movie, because I doubt very much that it is. I enjoyed it in part because it is a guilty pleasure. And it is a guilty pleasure because it is in a very curious way, a western hyper-stylized version of The Ten Ox Herding Songs of Zen Buddhism, A.K.A The Ten Bulls! LoL! It's funny, I didn't think of that until I tried to figure out why it was I liked it.

And so it was that I begin this review with a peculiar thought that, when I began to examine it more closely, is actually a pretty strong link.

Here's the Ox Herding Songs thing that I see in the movie:
Andy begins the journey with a strong identity of her place in the world. She (with the ostensibly masculine name) is a journalist, a documentarian of the 'real' world. And that real world demands she soil herself in the grime of money acquisition and its challenges to identity. When she is first faced with its challenge, she rejects it as being beneath her — her contempt for the fashion industry and those who profit from it. This is the first hypocrisy of Andy as the seeker of truth: her morals have given her the arrogance to be able to predetermine where the truth of the 'real' world can and cannot reside. This is an example of the classic Taoist problem of where the Tao does and does not reside: the mind, dazzled by its glittering truths and moral edicts, believes in demarcations and separations that do not in real reality really exist. [LoL at that sentence.]

Fortunately, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Her hypocrisy is challenged by Nigel (played by Stanley Tucci). 'You haven't tried, not really,' he tells her, 'so don't cry to me about how badly Miranda is treating you. If you want her respect, you need to respect your place here.' [That's a paraphrase, of course.] Slap! She is awakened to her hypocrisy, and moves into the fashion world fully. With skill and focus, she learns a new truth and rises to the top of the industry. But typical of all truth acquisition, she has in the process replaced her other truths with it without being aware of that change. Her other real world keeps reminding her of where she is from, and how far she has moved from it. She doesn't see it, so blind has she become to her new truth, which is to become fully one with the world — of fashion.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears. This time from Miranda, who slaps Andy with the truth of her journey. And so Andy leaves that world, the 'real' world, and applies for a job at a 'real' magazine. LoL. This scene transforms Miranda from being a mere puppet in her world, to a fully aware participant. She doesn't change or grow, but with the end we become aware of her self-awareness. We may not agree with it, but she has made a conscious choice to be, to embrace, her nature. In fact, without that self-awareness she would not have been able to teach Andy in the end and return her to her self with enlightenment.

So, what we see in Andy is the journey of the young idealist, who leaves her ideals to join the grimy world, and then move back to her ideals, but now with the acquisition of real-world wisdom.

Emily remains unchanged and, we see, largely without self-awareness. The hope that she will change is when Andy gives her the clothes without expectation of anything return. In Emily's world view, such 'exchanges' are unheard of because there are no free gifts. That is what I call planting a seed of doubt about the 'reality' of one's beliefs. Furthermore, the gift of clothes is a confirmation of Andy's spiritual growth: she is a part of the real world but apart from the real world at the same time.

I'll paraphrase and shorten the ten songs (or bulls as they are also known).

Here is the journey to one's Self:

   1) seeking for truth because of ignorance/hypocrisy;
   2) discovery of a path towards it (or a) truth;
   3) finding what you think is the truth because vision is too small to understand you haven't yet;
   4-7) struggle with that truth (Miranda/boyfriend, Emily/co-worker loyalty, etc.)
   8) Find the various faces of the truth.
   9) Rediscovery of self.
10) Return to the world.

Amusingly enough, even the name of the movie is a gesture towards this path: the devil is the archetypal energy of carnal physicality. The devil is what keeps us mired in the real world. And it is only in embracing the physical world fully, that the truth of our spiritual connection to it can be made. The shoe is often a dream symbol of 'understanding' because it holds up our feet. It also represents the intellectual (man-made) separation or gap between our soles/souls and our being grounded in the real world. The shoe may epitomize the fashion world, and also the crippling of feminine (anima) understanding: highly stylized, expensive, hobbling and, if kept on too long, ultimately crippling.

Sorry to have gone on so long, but as soon as I started thinking about this, more and more of the ideas and connections came into my consciousness. And yikes! This sounds so pompous. Sorry about that.

LoL! Addendum. I just realized that you can sure tell that this is a writers' group because I didn't even think of mentioning the acting or directing of this movie! I think that its success in bringing to my mind its link to The Ten Bulls was largely due to the top notch acting by all the main players: everyone's character rang true, to me. And the directing and editing kept the movie from dragging.

Wonderful review, Guy! I thoroughly enjoyed it , with special mention to the ten pointers! I l go back home and subscribe to your blog as well!

In the late 1990’s, an elderly friend of mine requested by letter that I read and review Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B, a novel Quinn had written after his success with Ishmael. I had never read anything quite like it. This is the reply I sent.

------------

In The Story of B, Daniel Quinn couches in a novel what appears to be a contemporary animist worldview. The thin plot has a twist I’ll admit took me by surprise. For the purposes of the story, the identity of B is relatively unimportant; what’s required is merely a character to give the concepts a voice. Finishing the book, I had an ambivalent sense that people are recognizing as never before the threat represented by our culture that despoils the earth; yet I am not sure how I feel about B’s prescription for the ailment or about the tone with which Quinn treats our presumed cultural demise. Civilization, not the preceding three million years of tribal living, produced Rodin's sculptures, Dvorak’s New World, and the blood pressure medicines that keep people I love alive.

B proposes that what we call the Agricultural Revolution was not a prelude to an inevitable development of civilization, but that civilization and its horrors are the product of an aberrant group who came to dominate the world. Salvationist religions sprang from the suffering introduced into the human condition by an artificial system of living which, for all its material achievements, does not work. The author offers no solutions as to how we might retain the benefits of civilization yet relinquish the complex social system that has furnished them.

The novel doesn’t address the possibility that nature controls man’s numbers very effectively and that overpopulation is one of her ways, when others have failed, of wiping out an animal that is evolutionarily unstable. What seems as likely as the scenario presented by B is that, almost from the beginning, nature marked man for extinction and that the Taker culture arose as a means to our extermination. There once were several species of man; now only one species of us left. When we’re gone, the earth will heal herself in a blink of geologic time.

Quinn makes us aware that several Leaver peoples tried our way of life and then discarded it because it doesn’t work. He doesn’t mention archeological evidence that Paleolithic man--Leaver cultures--inflicted serious damage to the earth, burning vast plains, using fire to drive whole herds of animals over cliffs, hunting animals to extinction. The characteristics of ours that for millenia assured our survival yet now threaten it may have defined mankind long before the Agricultural Revolution.

The Story of B seems to advocate an abandonment of Taker culture and a return to the Leaver way of life. That Taker culture developed, however, is proof that the seeds of our destruction are within us, so what would be the point? We can’t, ultimately, escape the web of nature from which we arose and into which, through evolution or extinction, we must disappear.

I found Quinn’s portrait of the petty Laurentian order convincing, but not his characterization of Father Lulfre. As an intelligent administrator, Lulfre wouldn’t have risked headlines such as “Laurentian executive implicated in numerous slayings.” Lulfre plays the unenviable role of villainous counterpart to B, the martyr-with-nine-lives of the animist cause.

It’s difficult not to feel that Charles Atterley enjoys seeing people wince, and that malice lurks between the lines; that for the sport of it, he is trying to give civilization a nasty spiritual slap, now that the situation seems to be volatile and people are culturally adrift. He’s recruiting those who are hot for rebellion, and he’s not interested in those who will require the patience of a real teacher.

Shirin’s final speech, cloaked at the end in strived-for eloquence, seems to expose a need to lash out, to strike back. Militantly stating that B is the Antichrist, she declares, “The evangelist John . . . was right to warn his followers against those who love the world. We are the ones he was talking about, and this is the final hour--but it’s their final hour, not ours. They’ve had their day . . .” Quinn is careful to leave unclear, however, whether B as the Antichrist is here with the visionary motive of bringing a paradigm shift or with the reactionary motive of destroying the establishment. It isn’t clear why an animist, who doesn’t subscribe to the notion of original sin and therefore of a necessary savior, considers himself the Antichrist.

B predictably suggests that a new social order is advisable, but the emphasis of the book seems to shift, and the reader finds himself choosing camps among cliquish characters whose motive is more to savor the egotism of being animism’s elect than to consider practical ways of delivering the vision to a humanity that desperately needs it. Shirin’s teaching that life is all of the same natural source, the same “fire,” is a philosophy common among naturalists.

With her quiet, beautiful teachings, Shirin seems the personification of a ruined earth who still sees mankind as her children and wants them to come home. The landscape, scraped by ice ages, scarred by our mammoth machines, is remembered by what is very old in us. In awakening us to the loss of a more gentle vision that once was ours, Daniel Quinn is peddling a potentially authentic, if unavoidably hopeless, restorative.

Guy wrote: “M and Al, dissed this movie.”

Guy, I didn’t say it was a bad movie, merely that it wasn’t my kind of movie.

Lampman, Henry P. The Wire Womb: Life in a Girls’ Penal Institution. Burnham, Inc., 1973.


It was like something out of a medievel torture chamber. “Doctor, there is a shocking thing in this room,” Miss Loomis, the superintendent, warns him. “I want you to understand I have never used this, and it will never be used while I am in charge of this institution.”

Miss Purdy, “mature and disused,” an untrained staff member charged with seeing that the girls do their chores, is a spinster straight out of Puritan times. She eyes the psychologist suspiciously. “Every item of her clothing, every drab wisp of hair, and her detergent-blistered hands seemed to accuse me of vanity and sin.” Miss Purdy knows that what girls need is punishment. “‘Mr.--young man--are you married?’ she asked, making a point of the ‘Mr.’ thus stripping me of my education and attacking my personal adequacy in six sharp words. . . . ‘You are a relatively young man, and I know that the behavior of some of these young women may be indelicate at times, to say the least. I think you understand me.’ She glared.”

The board, comprised of persons with political connections, is nervous about appointing a professional to the staff. The reformatory is a prison not only for delinquents but for girls who know things they shouldn’t. Among the board members who hold power, one woman especially is interested only in protecting her station and revels in control and manipulation. Lola Kittredge is the daughter of a rancher and sister of the Lieutenant Governor. “I was very spoiled and independent with I was sixteen,” she later tells the narrator. Her “body moved seductively as she talked, and her heavily-colored eyelids opened too wide as she looked at me. . . . ‘I told the governor,’ Lola said, ‘I did not have a thing to offer on this board, but I would love to help these girls.’ . . .” She tries to get the narrator to discuss things with her over drinks. She doesn’t like the idea of changes that might reduce the role of the reformatory or of persons like herself.

Looking through the files, the psychologist finds no evidence that any of the girls has ever been been represented by an attorney. Judges commit them arbitrarily, and no case is appealed. Some girls, regardless of their offense, are locked up until they’re twenty-one. Under old common law, as women had formerly been, juveniles are chattels. The case files contain almost no revealing information. Counseling the girls, the psychologist finds out that about a fourth of them have been raped by a “father, stepfather, uncle, or brother.” In the world to which the reformatory belongs, girls are dirty, the essence of sin, seducing men of good character, who are compelled to assault them. Men are not to blame, and there are ways to keep girls quiet.

One mid-morning, entering the main foyer, the narrator sees “two giants, a sheriff and a deputy, in full Western regalia. Behind them was their female escort, who came along to protect their good names. She was a woman of equal height and greater heft, also dressed in Western garb but without the gun belt. In tow behind this posse were four frightened girls, not one of whom was over fourteen years or ninety pounds, handcuffed to each other and the deputy.”

Jeannine is “a fragile brunette with fair skin and smoke-blue eyes,” the adopted child of a minister and his wife. She’s gifted at painting and accomplished at playing the piano. She looks younger than her age of seventeen and is utterly withdrawn, consumed with guilt for sins she hasn’t committed. Her parents are missionaries on an Indian reservation, where Jeannine has had the misfortune of falling in love. She relates of a kind, Indian boy: “My father said God had made us different and our love would be miscegenation. He said the Indians had been cursed and turned black and only the grace of God could save them.” Later, when her father sends a letter to her at the reformatory, requesting to see her, she’s terrified. She shows the letter to the psychologist, who asks, “Do you want to see your father if he comes, Jeannine?” She shakes her head, trembling: “I’ve got to tell you why, and I can’t tell you.” The psychologist probes: “You want me to understand why.” Her body contorting, she answers, “Yes, God knows why, but nobody else knows. Oh, help me. . . . He forced me to--to--.” She looks at him with panic in her eyes.

How the kindly Miss Loomis is hospitalized and her superintendent’s position commandeered by Lola Kittredge, with Miss Purdy “in a Queen Victoria pose” at her side; what’s in store for the incarcerated girls, for Marsha Mabry, for Rene Barbour (another girl who knew too much); the horrifying fate of Jeannine Post; and how the engine of torture in the locked high basement room again has an Inquisition to serve; are the dismal, unsettling things revealed to the reader at the end of the book.

The names have been changed, the location revealed only as one of the western states, but I surmised from the thumbnail biographical sketch of the author that the setting is probably New Mexico in the 1950s or 1960s. When I attempted to research it on the Internet, I found hardly anything about the author and nothing at all about the penal institution, which left me suspicious. The narrator finds himself at odds with an establishment hostile to his proposition that punishment without compassion is ineffective for rehabilitation, and that such institutions shouldn’t be run by amateurs. Finishing the book, I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of the reformatory, if it still exists, if it is still overseen by people of a mentality belonging more to the Dark Ages than to modern times.

Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories. New York: Random House, 1958.


“Never love a wild thing,” Holly advises Joe Bell, owner of an old bar on Lexington Avenue. Years later, Bell still remembers her and has a photo recently given him by Mr. Yunioshi, the photographer who once occupied the upper floor of the brownstone, who says he’s seen a carved image of Holly in the wilds of Africa, where she appears to have “shared the woodcarver’s mat.”

She’s Lulamae Barnes. As a child, she is orphaned with her brother by tuberculosis, left destitute. At fourteen, she marries a horse doctor. “She didn’t have to lift a finger,” Doc relates of her life on his farm outside Tulip, Texas, “‘ ’cept to eat a piece of pie. ’Cept to comb her hair and send away for all the magazines.’” One day she walks away down the road and never comes back. Five years later, Doc learns where she is and leaves for New York City to find her.

She has calling cards expensively printed at Tiffany’s: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling. “She’s strictly a girl you'll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals,” her agent, O. J. Berman, tells the narrator. There are days when she gets “the mean reds,” about which the narrator asks Holly: “‘Same as the blues?’ ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. . . . But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.’ . . .”

Her dream is to get rich somehow and buy land by the sea in Mexico, land where she can raise horses and make a home for her slow brother Fred, who’s in the Army. At swank clubs, she solicits money from men for “the powder room.” The coloratura who lives on the bottom floor of the brownstone attempts to have Holly evicted as “morally objectionable.” Holly admits, “I’d steal two bits off a dead man’s eyes if I thought it would contribute to the day’s enjoyment . . .” She avoids the zoo because she can’t “bear to see anything in a cage,” and when she buys the narrator a bird cage he covets at an antique store, she tells him, “Promise me, though. Promise me you’ll never put a living thing in it.”

The narrator conspicuously takes time to acquaint the reader with Mildred Grossman, a girl he remembers from school, “with her hair moist and greasy spectacles, her stained fingers that dissected frogs . . .” In his mind, Mildred and Holly are opposites who will never change, their natures arrested early on, Mildred the embodiment of the cerebral and Holly of the appetites, both blind to the pitfalls of life because of their one-sidedness. In his mind “they acquired a Siamese twinship . . .”

In an interesting hospital-room scene, in which Holly is recovering from a miscarriage, the narrator describes her true appearance: “She looked not quite twelve years: her pale vanilla hair brushed back, her eyes, for once minus their dark glasses, clear as rainwater . . .” She tells him that on learning of her brother’s death in action, shortly before wrecking her apartment she had a vision of “a fat mean red” woman in a rocking chair, holding Fred on her lap and “laughing like a brass band. The mockery of it! But that’s all that's ahead for us, my friend: this comedienne waiting to give you the old razz. Now do you see why I went crazy and broke everything?” The “mean reds” and what Holly describes as the “fat mean red bitch rocking in rocking chair” bear a psychological connection for her that likely stems from childhood deprivations, the uncertainty of what’s to come.

The incident in Spanish Harlem involving the cat, in the wind and rain, is a telling one, though ultimately I find myself unable to piece together from the clues in the story why Holly is incapable of getting close to someone emotionally. It isn’t coincidental that she calls the narrator by the name of her brother, the one person she loves and for whom she feels an authentic mothering instinct; but like the narrator, she seems otherwise incapable of love except in the way one can love one’s “mother’s elderly colored cook and the postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick.” Her on-again, off-again friendship with the never-named narrator develops until in “[t]hose final weeks, spanning the end of summer and the beginning of another autumn,” their understanding of each other “had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions . . .”

If this were any other story, the writing would steal the show, but in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the author has managed to marry a glamorous facility for expression with a narrative absorbing in its own right. It’s one of those peculiar stories that, like “The Beast in the Jungle” or “Goblin Market” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” is worth reading for the writing alone and the story alone.