Two days. Three, including today. I will be done with session in less than 72 hours and not a moment too soon.
In Books…
- As If: Ever since I first saw Cher Horowitz’s closet in Clueless for the first time when I was about 11, I have been obsessed with the movie. As a pre-teen girl, I was very much in the demographic this movie was made for, and a trip to the video store to pick up Clueless became a necessary part of sleepover nights. Even as I’m pushing 40, it has never lost its charm…so obviously I am going to pick up a book giving an oral history about how it got made. It was surprisingly educational about the process of movie-making! It covers everything from shopping the script around, to the casting (with predictably delightful anecdotes about who was almost in the movie…Sarah Michelle Gellar as Amber very nearly happened!), to location scouting, to lighting design, to hair and wardrobe, to the selection of songs for the soundtrack. It seems like the shoot was genuinely a good time, very in keeping with the movie’s bouncy tone, though recollections turn bittersweet when the cast and crew remember Brittany Murphy. If you’re looking for a serious analysis of the movie, that’s not what’s on offer here. Rather, it’s a collection of anecdotes about making a teen movie that became an enduring classic because of its wit and charm. The people who made it are generally smart, funny, and enjoyed their work together. It’s not pure fluff, but it’s not serious or hard-hitting. An enjoyable read for those who love the movie, but not a must-read otherwise.
- The Friday Afternoon Club: Griffin Dunne’s book is subtitled “A Family Memoir”, and that it very much is. He starts his story with the tale of his grandparents before moving on to his parents, Ellen “Lenny” Beatriz and Dominick Dunne. If that name is familiar, it’s because he became quite famous as a writer for Vanity Fair and published novelist. Griffin’s uncle, John Gregory Dunne, was also a writer but his fame was eclipsed by that of his wife, Griffin’s aunt Joan Didion. Though Griffin was born in New York, his father’s work in the entertainment industry resulted in an early move to Los Angeles, where he and his siblings Alex and Dominique were raised. It was a wild childhood. His parents occasionally brought him along to adult parties or allowed him to make brief special guest appearances at their own to-dos…including a Black and White Ball that Truman Capote thought was such a clever idea he stole it for himself. He became lifelong best friends with a girl in the neighborhood his brother had developed a nascent crush on, who turns out to be Carrie Fisher. Smart but not academically inclined, Griffin struggled in school until he found acting, but a disciplinary incident led him to drop out of school entirely. If you know much about his family from general popular culture, you know what the book is building towards and what hangs like a cloud over the recounting of light-hearted youthful antics like hitching back from Colorado to California or working the popcorn booth at Radio City Music Hall. His sister, Dominique, also an actor, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend when she was only 22 years old. The trial of her killer took place during the peak of his success in acting, and he recounts the relief of being able to lose himself in a role when his life was full of such tumult. He closes with meeting his first wife, Carey Lowell, and the birth of his daughter Hannah. Dunne’s life is certainly interesting enough to support a memoir, even without recounting his later years, which has included directing Practical Magic. As the parent of a young child, thinking about him growing up the way Dunne did is bananas. It was a different era, but thinking about an elementary-age kid wandering around a party where people are high on coke is…not what I’m planning to do. That a privileged kid was hitchhiking and hanging out regularly at a little scuzzy diner in the wee hours of the morning with sex workers feels very odd from today’s perspective. Apparently skill with words has at least some genetic component, because Dunne’s writing is engaging. His portrait of Carrie Fisher and their friendship is moving for all of the zany shenanigans they got into, and you can feel that he still misses her dearly. He writes about his parents with a clear-eyed sympathy, acknowledging their struggles and demons without letting them entirely off the hook for the mistakes they made. And his depiction of the toll his sister’s death took on his family is heartbreaking, all the more so for not indulging in sentimentality. It does feel almost a little unfinished, his romance with Lowell is not lingered on and after his daughter’s birth it just kind of ends. If you like Hollywood gossip, there’s a lot here for you, or even if you’re just interested in a true story about a deeply dysfunctional family trying to figure out how to be people together. I liked it and would recommend it.
- The Equations of Life: All of life is subject to the laws of physics. Seems like a reasonable thing, but it means that the dividing line between physics and biology is perhaps more porous than one might think. Charles Cockell’s book takes this idea and drills it down about as far as it can go, from exploring all of the ways in which a ladybug’s design is a result of the pressures physics applies to it…not just the things you might think of, like flight aerodynamics, but the number of joints in its legs and how it can climb up walls. He further illustrates by referencing the ways earth-burrowing creatures like worms and especially moles have evolved for their environments, in which they can only live if they can bring sufficient force to bear on dirt to allow them to move forward underground. This is why moles all look roughly similar even when they evolved on entirely different continents. This was the peak of my engagement with the book. Cockell then looks deeper and deeper at the building blocks of life to examine how physics is central to the way cellular membranes form, how amino acids and proton pumps works, how DNA’s double helix holds together. Along the way, he considers questions about why animals never evolved wheels or propellers, and whether any other element besides carbon, and any other solvent besides water, could give rise to complex life. This book was a recommendation from a good friend, and honestly I think I am just the wrong audience for it. My intellectual curiosity does not turn in this direction, I do not find these questions engaging or stimulating. I also haven’t taken a biology class in over 20 years or a physics class ever. I did not have the baseline knowledge necessary to truly follow the book where it was trying to go, nor did I have much of a reason to try to wrestle my brain onto the path. What I’m saying is that there was a decent amount of skimming here. At no point did I enjoy reading it, though it wasn’t poorly written or stubbornly dense. It was just a profound mismatch between reader and book.
- The Accursed: This sprawling novel, which in its Kindle edition exceeds 1000 pages, tells the tale of a series of events in Princeton, New Jersey in 1905 and 1906. Woodrow Wilson is at this point President of Princeton University, which is still a bit of a red-headed stepchild to Harvard and Yale. The city is still very provincial, surrounded by open land, with a small and tight-knit upper-class community that includes the (fictional) Slades and the very real Burrs and even former President of the United States Grover Cleveland. The public manifestation of the odd events of that time begins with the wedding of Annabel Slade, the beloved granddaughter of Old Princeton fixture Winslow Slade, a former university president and Governor. Immediately after she exchanges vows with a handsome army officer, before she has so much as exchanged a kiss with her husband, she leaves the church to run away with Axson Mayte, a mysterious man who had recently appeared in town and insinuated himself among the local luminaries. But the events, which become known as The Curse, are much more broad-ranging than that, expanding to include suspected infidelity, spectral visions, even murder. The root causes, when they are revealed, turn out to be dark and deep and inextricably tied to the sins of Princeton’s elite, visited on their descendants. There is a LOT of book here and I can understand why it seems to have engendered a wide range of responses. The book’s self-consciously self-aware structure, being presented as the narrative of a Princeton-based historian’s investigation, complete with extensive footnoting and references to how the materials were discovered, can get a little tedious. More than a little tedious is the side plot concerning Upton Sinclair shortly after he has written The Jungle and is living in Princeton, before the book takes off and while he and his young family are still under significant financial strain. Sinclair has little connection to the main story so the extensive detours about the internal dynamics of the Socialist movement (including Sinclair’s admiration and then disabusement from that admiration of Jack London) slow the tale’s already leisurely pace. It does feel like Oates tries to shove in a role for every major historical personage she can, with Mark Twain given a completely unnecessary cameo and Grover Cleveland’s appearances basically amounting to a recurring fat joke. One character even hallucinates Sherlock Holmes. All that being said, I had mostly a good time here (perhaps assisted by the fact that after four nonfiction books in a row, I was very ready for a book that was storytelling-forward). It’s very Gothic, with demons and homoeroticism and vampires and even some incest-y overtones. The central characters are all flawed but in interesting ways, and their sheer number means that the narrative can bounce around between them even if it’s not moving forward very fast. It’s overlong and indulgent but if you’re looking for a big, giant, well-written but kind of messy book, there is enjoyment to be had here!
In Life…
- Sine die looms: No matter what happens, legislative session is constitutionally mandated to come to a close at 11:59:59 PM on June 2. Could there be an immediate special session? Yes, always possible. It’s happened more than once, including both last session and my very first session. But if there is, it will likely be quite short.
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