There are only a finite number of British actors available to work in period miniseries, and I have seen them all. Sometimes more than twice. They appear in the empire of BBC adaptations as created by Andrew Davies: Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, and The Way We Live Now (et al.).

This 5-hour rendition of Anthony Trollope’s 500+ page novel follows the intersecting fortunes of two families — the Melmottes and the Carburys — and numerous people connected to them. Neither are admirably headed. M. Melmotte (David Suchet, aka Hercule Poirot) is an unsavory high-stakes stock swindler, while Felix Carbury (played by the pathetic excuse for a Mr. Darcy in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice) is an unsavory gad-about-town who gambles and drinks away his limited fortune.

There’s also Mrs. Hurtle, American caricature (Eowyn, doing her worst Scarlett O’Hara accent), Mr Alf., played straight by Rob Brydon (Toby Shandy), Marie Melmotte (a Frenchwoman played by a Scottish actress, who was also in Tristram Shandy), Lady Longstaffe (Mrs. Badger in Bleak House and Mrs. Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice), the maid Dido (Lilo Baur, who reprises her dour French maid performance in Bleak House), Dolly Longstaffe (also in Bleak House) and the only believable American accent, Hamilton K. Fisker (played by a Canadian).

(There are also dozens of other characters played by actors appearing in BBC adaptations I have not yet seen.)

The miniseries was enjoyably campy, but (surprising for Davies) not all that faithful to the book. Twice the characters blurt out the title, which never occurs in the book, and there are some ridiculous, anachronistic assertions about sexual behavior. But the two things that really bugged me were places where the original text was more provocative than what ended up on screen.

First, Marie Melmotte’s character. In the book, she starts out like most of the other young women: complete milquetoast, content to follow the demands of her family (or remain quietly sullen about them). She falls for Felix Carbury, mostly because he pays any attention to her whatsoever. When he spurns her, she sobs in the requisite manner, while he’s so indifferent he can’t be bothered to steal her immense fortune. In the end, she emerges as a powerful foe, refusing to bail out her father’s pyramid scheme and letting his life end in ruin.

The outcome in the series is the same, but the build-up is all wrong. The movie Marie is wild from the start, defiant and bitter (and dubiously French-accented, but whatever). There’s no surprise when she refuses to save her wretched family. While there are some off-handed mentions of her father’s beatings, she does not look or act helpless, so it feels like there’s nothing for her to overcome. The movie strips her of her arc. She’s even robbed of her coda, in which she heads out for the American frontier.

My other complaint is in the adaptation of Melmotte’s election to Parliament. In the movie, this is a footnote: a quick scene as part of his rise to power. In the book, this occurs as part of his much longer downfall. Running as a Conservative, his peers in the gentry have already begun to distance themselves from him — there are rumors of scandal and his own nouveau-riche behavior is repugnant to them. It is almost certain that he will lose the election, but unexpectedly, he doesn’t. Why?

Because he’s voted in by the poor. Having presented himself as a man of the people, who came from the gutter and pulled himself up by his chaussures, he resonates with the masses, even though there is a legitimate, honest, populist candidate running against him. The poor hear the aristocracy condemn him and think, “They condemn us too, so this guy must be okay.” And thus he wins, when everyone knowledgable already sees that he’s a crook.

I guess this just struck me as particularly interesting these days.

Last night I made a vegan version of Jasper White’s Southwestern Corn Chowder via Matthew Amster-Burton. Here’s what I did:

• 3 ears yellow corn, grilled
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 red onion, cut into half-inch dice
• 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh thyme
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin (roasted whole, then ground)
• 1/8 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 pound red potatoes, peeled and cut into half-inch dice
• 3 cups corn broth (see below)
• salt and pepper
• 1 large poblano chile, grilled, peeled, cored, and diced
• 2 teaspoons arrowroot
• 2 tablespoons minced cilantro
• scallions and cilantro for garnish
• 1 dried chipotle, soaked in warm water

1. Grill the corn per Cook’s Illustrated: remove all but the last layer of husk, leaving the kernels barely visible. Grill for about 6 minutes, turning occasionally.
2. Grill the poblano: core and remove seeds, then split and flatten, smear with olive oil, grill until the skin blackens. I couldn’t be bothered to peel all of the skin and we all lived.
3. Dry-roast the whole cumin. There’s a trend here: I wanted to maximize the flavors of all the major ingredients since we were doing without the bacon. I’m not sure if this was detectable in the final product, but it felt like Cooking.
4. After husking, cutting and milking the corn, I put the cobs into 4 cups of boiling water, added some garlic, peppercorns and parsley, and made a broth while preparing the other ingredients. I had bought some commercial veggie broth but the corn broth actually had pretty good flavor, so I never used it.
5. Follow the recipe as given with obvious substitutions.
6. At the end I added a few tablespoons of the chipotle soaking liquid. I could’ve added more, and probably gone ahead and added actual diced chipotle, but I didn’t want to end up with chipotle soup.

I used red onion instead of yellow because that feels more “southwestern” to me. The store didn’t have Yukon Golds so I went with low-starch red potatoes, but I think in a vegan soup a better mix would’ve been diced red potatoes for substance, but a baking potato for starch. I’ve been told that Potato Buds® are a popular vegan trick for making thick chowder.

People seemed to like it, but there was still plenty left over, which strikes me as ideal.

What I remember about reading early American fiction in school is that I found it tiresomely obsessive about the great expanses of amber waves of grain and rugged individualists who forged this great blah blah blah. That was one reason why I put off reading American works in any number until year two of this project. So here I am.

In the novel, young Jim Burden describes growing up amid American and Eastern European homesteaders in what was then the wilds of Nebraska. He is especially taken with his neighbor, Ántonia, and describes her teenage years and subsequent adulthood in detail.

I do not think Willa Cather and her contemporary Upton Sinclair really saw eye-to-eye about the merits of an agrarian lifestyle. I’m going to have to go with Sinclair here; if subsistence farming in a pre-electrical world is so great, why doesn’t everybody do it? A few hippies tried it in the Sixties and they grew up to be stockbrokers. Even Cather lived her whole adult life in New York City.

But she wrote this famous book which is a paean to rutting around in the dirt. “I used to love to drift along the pale yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem.” Yes, yes, this is very pretty. The descriptions are all like this — relentlessly beautiful. Meanwhile major characters are shooting themselves in the head or beating their wives or gnawing on the boiled bread-like mash of whatever was mouldering in the cellar three months into winter. I didn’t sense that the genuine hardships she describes were meant to be ironically juxtaposed against the rugged beauty — when the characters come to town they get restless and the townies they meet are almost uniformly amoral jerks. Starvation’s okay, it builds character, and manual labor builds big strong muscles on Ántonia.

Famously, nothing really happens in the novel. The plot moves along, and the characters age, and while there are some dramatic twists, they happen off-screen. Cather did not want to write melodrama. This makes for a curious relationship between the narrator, Jim, and Ántonia, whom critics seem to universally assert he loves. If so, it’s a weirdly platonic love. They do not get together in any meaningful way despite no social barriers to doing so. He instead sees Ántonia as some kind of untouchable womanly- (but not feminine-) ideal. His other relationships are stilted or loveless. “People said there must be something queer about a boy who showed no interest in girls of his own age, but who could be lively enough when he was with [Ántonia] and Lena or the three Marys.” Or maybe he’s supposed to be gay.

Cather, who never married, was intensely private (she insisted none of her letters be published, which this site seems to cheerfully ignore). When she was young, she dressed in men’s clothes and wore her hair scandalously short. Now I would be the first person to insist that this doesn’t prove anything, but what most obviously disproves any suspicion is having a relationship with a man, of which she had none. Biographers are curiously reticent to state the obvious: “…though it is true that her strongest emotional attachments (outside of her father and brothers) were to women, all the evidence points to a celibate writer, married only to her art.” Who do they think she is, Morrissey?

Look, here’s a novel with a male narrator with some unresolved sexual issues yet whose “mind was full of her”, full of this manly, powerfully-fecund farm woman who threshes wheat with her bare hands. The book is semi-autobiographical; Ántonia was based on a real person whom Cather knew in her childhood and visited again as an adult, just like Jim: “She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.” Biographers say, “If one defines a lesbian as a woman who has sexual relations with another woman, Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records.” Fine. But to not call this a lesbian novel is to be disingenuous.

Whenever I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered, I used to think of the tone in which poor Mr. Shimerda, who could say so little, yet managed to say so much when he exclaimed, “My Án-tonia!”

I know someone who claims to love this book. That is such a grandiose assertion over the merely unbelievable “I have read it” that I can only choose to accept its truth. However, he is English and therefore may be making some kind of joke.

I have read it, in the sense that I have turned 615 pages and processed the meaning of most of the words on each of them. The novel is so rambling and digressive that it’s hard to say I really read it. My final evaluation is that it’s a work best appreciated from a distance, like the distance between yourself and your television playing Michael Winterbottom’s movie. I didn’t love the book, but I loved the idea of it.

Let me reiterate the same talking points that are parroted by the characters in the film: it’s a meta-novel before there were novels to be meta about; it hardly gets around to getting started much less being finished; it’s got weird typographic stuff all over the place. All of that, and a lot more besides, is really great. It was just a total slog.

When I’m reading these books I tag passages that I think I will want to write about later. Re-reading them now, they are almost all dirty.

I define a nose as follows, —- intreating only beforehand, and beseeching my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and condition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against the temptations and suggestions of the devil, and suffer him by no art or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into my definition. —- For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs, — I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.

“My sister, I dare say”, added he, “does not care to let a man come so near her ****”. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had compleated the sentence or not ; —— ’tis for his advantage to suppose he had, —- as, I think, he could have added no ONE WORD which would have improved it.”

Keyholes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.

I haven’t quoted any passages from the part about the hot chestnut in the guy’s pants, but it’s here if you want to do the honors yourself.

I also tagged all the famous metafictional bits: the black pages, the empty page for the reader to draw in their own portrait of the Widow Wadman, a missing chapter (including a jump in page numbers; in the original printing this resulted in the right-hand pages becoming even-numbered, although my Penguin edition resumed the numbering in the usual way).

But between all this there is a lot of book to get through, and that is what tends to bog down modern readers. I feel good about having read it, and even though the movie is about how no one knows the book, it’s extra-funny if you have. I recommend it the way I recommend dropping a hot chestnut down your pants: titillating at first, sometimes quite painful, but you can blog about it afterwards.

Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?

On the other hand, I actually finished Tristram Shandy, which is more than I can say for The Mezzanine.

I didn’t really get this book. Written in the heart of the Victorian period but not published until after Samuel Butler’s death, the author considered it too scathing a criticism of society in general and his own family in particular. I appreciated, from an intellectual standpoint, that its hero is an atheist (something modern American society continues to find distasteful) but I didn’t get in to the rhythm of its rambling pan-generational format and the references to the various factions of 19th century Christianity were lost on me.

I did get why he might not have wanted to publish it during his lifetime, though:

“Why,” he exclaimed, with all the arrogance of youth, “they put a gipsy or fortune-teller into prison for getting money out of silly people who think they have supernatural power; why should they not put a clergyman in prison for pretending that he can absolve sins, or turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of One who died two thousand years ago?”

And if not for that, then for this, as Butler was rumored to be gay and desperately afraid of being “Wilded”:

Towneley belonged to one of the most exclusive sets in Cambridge, and was perhaps the most popular man among the whole number of undergraduates. He was big and very handsome–as it seemed to Ernest the handsomest man whom he ever had seen or ever could see, for it was impossible to imagine a more lively and agreeable countenance. [...] He liked looking at him if he got a chance, and was very much ashamed of himself for doing so, but there the matter ended.

Hot Victorian guy-on-guy action. Take that Sarah Waters.

Last night I saw the Battlestar Galactica (2003) miniseries for the first time and thought it was really excellent. We got the DVD from Netflix and had already decided that if we liked the miniseries we’d just buy the first season outright rather than filling up the Netflix queue.

After we finished it I said to Dan, “I’m going to order this on Amazon right now so it gets shipped out as early as possible on Saturday.”

“OK,” he said. “Or we could just go to Newbury Comics and pick it up.”

Sometimes I forget that there are still stores.

In ‘06, the United States in overwhelmed by materialism and greed, driven by advertisers determined to make us feel inadequate. Being middle class isn’t good enough, they suggest — you need to aspire to the luxury items of the ultra-rich. If you can’t afford them, you can buy them on credit (with interest, of course).

Critics decry the situation. “Beneath the hundred thousand women of the elite are a million middle-class women, miserable because they are not of the elite, and trying to appear of it in public… When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising–the science of persuading people to buy what they do not want—he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first.”

When I added “The Jungle” to my list I didn’t realize that it was the 100th anniversary of the publication of the novel. Because of that I was able to buy this excellent special edition with artwork by Charles Burns:

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has a little bit of the twelve-year-old boy in them. Unfortunately, my twelve-year-old boy was into computer games, not adventure on the high seas. Of all the novels I read this year, this was both the shortest and hardest. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about Crusoe taming the goats or making his raisins or building his summer home. There are lots of film adaptations but I couldn’t find the interest to watch any of them, even the one with the hairy Pierce Brosnan. I found the Wikipedia entry more interesting than the book, which is a terrible thing to say. I did care about Friday, but everything about the character is depressing.

One day, walking up the same hill, but the weather being hazy at sea, so that we could not see the continent, I called to him, and said, “Friday, do not you wish yourself in your own country, your own nation?” “Yes,” he said, “I be much O glad to be at my own nation.” “What would you do there?” said I. “Would you turn wild again, eat men’s flesh again, and be a savage as you were before?” He looked full of concern, and shaking his head, said, “No, no, Friday tell them to live good; tell them to pray God; tell them to eat corn-bread, cattle flesh, milk; no eat man again.”

Friday needs to get moving on that, because in a few years that entire nation will be exterminated. On the other hand, corn-bread is pretty good.

It’s one thing to be taught about modernism. You sit in high school English class and dutifully take notes: “Modernist literature was a break from the realism of the past and a movement towards symbolism and stream-of-consciousness, and a relaxation of previously-inviolate social conventions. [Scribbled unflattering caricature of teacher] [Anarchy symbol].”

It’s another thing to slog through eleven pre-20th century classics and then be confronted with unrepentant boozing, fucking and swearing — and that’s just the women. It’s weird to say, but I was almost offended by this book.

Of course Lady Chatterley is no Jane Eyre, either, but Chatterley is expressly about the war between the old and the new, set amidst the same indolent English gentry I recognized from the previous three hundred fictional years. In Gatsby, the new has been solidly victorious, and the characters naively assume that both the culture war and the world war is a thing of the past.

Once I got over my classics-induced prissiness (gay sex, for shame!), I really enjoyed the novel. It’s the only one I can truly say that about — where every page was simply enjoyable (as much as is possible when everyone in the book is broken and miserable). Part of it was that it’s so American. Henry James was my only other American author, but his book is set in Europe and populated largely by Europeans. Everyone in Gatsby talks like people I know, except that nobody I know says “old sport.” I guess that’s Jazz Age for “dawg.”

I didn’t watch the 1974 film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, because those people are too famous to ever believe as characters from a novel. Plus by now I had moved on to the 2006 book list, which meant three unbelievably painful months of Tristram Shandy, the book that no one but me has ever read.

Jane Austen’s oeuvre ends on kind of a downer note. Persuasion is no fairy-tale in which a tousled and damp Colin Firth rides in to whisk away a raven-haired, sharp-tongued young woman to his sprawling estate, winning her with acidic wit and brooding, needy glances from across the –

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Persuasion. It’s the wish-fulfillment of the older woman who thought she missed her only chance at love, not the pink-and-ponies bridal fantasy of Pride and Prejudice. This means it’s less fun to read. If I wanted to listen to women in their thirties complain they aren’t married, I’d watch Sex and the City. Austen is widely considered to have invented the romance novel, but in the case of Persuasion, we’re talking more like chick lit. And even Bridget Jones gets to make out with Colin Firth.

In a lot of Austen literature, the heroine is described as plainer than her sisters, friends or desirable cousins. Filmmakers then proceed to cast these roles with Kiera Knightley and Gwenyth Paltrow. Not so the BBC, which took seriously the descriptions of Anne Elliot in the first chapter: “faded and thin,” and “haggard.” In fact nearly everyone in the miniseries looks like they’re riding the Green Line at rush hour. This does not make for a sweeping period romance, but it might be an okay documentary that reminds me how nice it is to live in the 21st century where I’m allowed to have my own money and a job.

What made reading the book worthwhile is this exchange at the end, between Anne and a male friend on the subject of whether it is women or men who love longest and deepest. It was not part of the original ending. It feels, a little, like the words of an author who didn’t live long enough to see a future she might like too.

“Well, Miss Elliot,” (lowering his voice,) “as I was saying we shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman, would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you — all stories, prose and verse. If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”