Director/writer Wes Anderson

We went to the movies tonight, to see Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (dir. Martin McDonagh). Really good movie. Frances McDormand is beyond words.

Among the interminable previews, most of which I'd already seen (I guess I've been going to the movies lately—yay!), there was a new one: Isle of Dogs, an animated film directed by Wes Anderson.

Which reminded me: Wes Anderson! Talk about quirky—and wonderful. I've enjoyed all the Wes Anderson films I've seen. Which amounts to nine, with this new one. I've seen all but one of them (I think: my memory of a few of them is hazy).

This site ranks Anderson's films from "best to worst"—although as they also say, he has never made a bad movie . . . which leads to a lot of impassioned comments and redone best-to-worst lists.

I'd say my favorite Wes Anderson films are Moonrise Kingdom, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox. But I might just have to watch all of them all over again (plus the one I've missed), and re-rank. Maybe it's an ever-changing ranking, depending on one's mood. Maybe ranking isn't an issue, but simply enjoying. The thing for what it is. Yeah, that.

Here are trailers for his films in chronological order. I might have a new project.

Bottle Rocket (1996)

Rushmore (1998)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Writer George Saunders

George Saunders has published nine books, according to his website, including four of short fiction—CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013)—the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), and the recent multiple-award-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). He's also written a children's book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2005).

I've only read Tenth of December, and found it amazing. I am about to simultaneously read and listen to Lincoln, on a friend's suggestion: the audio version apparently helps bring all the many voices in the book to life, but I want to read along to be able to (I hope) better appreciate the language. Because Saunders is a master. Hands down.

Here, I thought I'd just provide some links to a few of his interviews and comments on the writing process et cetera, to dip into now and then (again and again). Plus a few YouTube videos, just for fun. He seems to enjoy speaking about writing and his approach to it. It's all illuminating.

Watch [Musician] Jason Isbell Meet George Saunders and Have an Epic Conversation, from GQ 10/27/17 (yes, you can watch: there's a 54-minute video included)
Getting Out of Our Normal Crap: George Saunders on Writing and Transcendence, from the Los Angeles Review of Books 5/22/17
George Saunders: What Writers Really Do When They Write, from the Guardian 3/4/17
The Rumpus Interview with George Saunders, 2/20/17
My Writing Education: A Time Line, from the New Yorker 10/22/15
George Saunders: My Desktop, from the Guardian 4/22/13
Graduation speech at Syracuse University, 2013: "The Importance of Kindness" (and you can see a sweet animation of it here).

Here's a summary of points he made in a talk at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver.

This video is on the "tricks of the writing process."

This one is on writing and Saunders's tactics for ruthless editing.

Here he is reading and speaking about his process for an hour in 2013 (Talks at Google):

This article provides links to ten of his stories—including "Sea Oak" (New Yorker, 12/28/98), which has recently been made into an Amazon original TV show, pilot only so far, with Glenn Close. It's wacky!

Artist Hans Waanders

I recently saw a "map of the world" shaped by the various names that people all over attach to the kingfisher. It's wonderful!

It turns out, the creator of this map seems to have been obsessed by kingfishers—an obsession I can relate to, because for sure, kingfishers are my favorite bird. (Though he seemed to like water too.)

I thought I'd share a few other images by this Dutch artist, Hans Waanders, who died in 2001, at age sixty. I guess you could call him an "obsessive," but . . . what's wrong with that?

Water, 1995

110 Water Stamps, 1995

A Little Jacques Prévert

I stumbled on this on Facebook (which I love for just this sort of thing) and thought I'd share.

It's by Jacques Prévert, whom I have a fondness for because he was the favorite poet and bard of a long-departed friend of ours, Frank (RIP). Here's the English (I could not determine who the translator is), followed by Prévert himself reciting it, in French, followed by that text—which, y'know, rhymes. C'est un poème tellement charmant. Enjoy!

Song of the Snails on Their Way to a Funeral

Two snails were going to the funeral of a dead leaf.
Their shells were shrouded in black,
and they had wrapped crepe around their horns.
They set out in the evening,
one glorious autumn evening.
Alas, when they arrived
it was already spring.
The leaves who once were dead
had all sprung to life again.
The two snails were very disappointed.
But then the sun, the sun said to them,
“Take the time to sit awhile.
Take a glass of beer
if your heart tells you to.
Take, if you like, the bus to Paris.
It leaves this evening.
You’ll see the sights.
But don’t use up your time with mourning.
I tell you, it darkens the white of your eye
and makes you ugly.
Stories of coffins aren’t very pretty.
Take back your colours,
the colours of life.”
Then all the animals,
the trees and the plants
began to sing at the tops of their lungs.
It was the true and living song,
the song of summer.
And they all began to drink
and to clink their glasses.
It was a glorious evening,
a glorious summer evening,
and the two snails went back home.
They were moved,
and very happy.
They had had a lot to drink
and they staggered a little bit,
but the moon in the sky watched over them.

Chanson des escargots qui vont à l'enterrement

A l'enterrement d'une feuille morte
Deux escargots s'en vont
Ils ont la coquille noire
Du crêpe autour des cornes
Ils s'en vont dans le soir
Un très beau soir d'automne
Hélas quand ils arrivent
C'est déjà le printemps
Les feuilles qui étaient mortes
Sont toutes réssucitées
Et les deux escargots
Sont très désappointés
Mais voila le soleil
Le soleil qui leur dit
Prenez prenez la peine
La peine de vous asseoir
Prenez un verre de bière
Si le coeur vous en dit
Prenez si ça vous plaît
L'autocar pour Paris
Il partira ce soir
Vous verrez du pays
Mais ne prenez pas le deuil
C'est moi qui vous le dit
Ça noircit le blanc de l'oeil
Et puis ça enlaidit
Les histoires de cercueils
C'est triste et pas joli
Reprenez vous couleurs
Les couleurs de la vie
Alors toutes les bêtes
Les arbres et les plantes
Se mettent a chanter
A chanter a tue-tête
La vrai chanson vivante
La chanson de l'été
Et tout le monde de boire
Tout le monde de trinquer
C'est un très joli soir
Un joli soir d'été
Et les deux escargots
S'en retournent chez eux
Ils s'en vont très émus
Ils s'en vont très heureux
Comme ils ont beaucoup bu
Ils titubent un petit peu
Mais la haut dans le ciel
La lune veille sur eux.

Anti-racism Reading

This evening I went, for the first time, to a book group that's been around for a year and a half, sponsored by the local group Whites for Racial Equity. We discussed Michael Eric Dyson's Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. I am only halfway through, so I couldn't speak to everything, but some good points were made, and it was a lively discussion. Though I have to say, it was a little strange to be in a room of half a dozen white folks, talking about a sermon to . . . white folks. (Granted, one is married to an African American woman, and together they are the parents of past NAACP president Benjamin Jealous; and the book group's leader is a Unitarian pastor.)

But we are living in strange times, where white supremacy is on the rise, and ugly nationalism just keeps getting uglier, and Black Lives Matter becomes "all lives matter" because of amnesia and denial and a refusal to just sit and listen to the 400 years of white people putting black people down in this country.

It's all very complicated. This book group is trying to tease out how to approach the big knot that race relations in this country are.

I will post my report on Tears We Cannot Stop shortly, once I've finished. But I have to say, the more I read ("educate myself," as Dyson urges us white folk to do), the stupider I feel.

Or perhaps I should say, the more entitled I feel—and wanting to make amends. Somehow.

Anyway, for now, here's a list of the readings the group has considered since it began in June 2016. I've read a few on my own. I'd like to go after some of the titles I haven't encountered yet.

Chris Crass, Towards the “Other America”: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (a favorite of mine)
Chimananda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (selected in 2013 as a NYT top 10 notable book)
Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
an essay: Summer Brennan, "Notes from the Resistance: A Column on Language and Power"
Wesley Lowery, They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Claudia M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do
Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
James Baldwin, "Letter from a Region in My Mind" 

I would add Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award winner Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Except I haven't read it (though of course I have it). But maybe I'll pick that up soon, and if it draws me in, I'll suggest it to the book group ringleader. It might be worth considering.

Poetry (Ellen Bass)

Indigo

by Ellen Bass (who you can hear reading this poem here)

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

Reading Challenge

Two years ago, in honor of my sixty-first birthday, I challenged myself to read sixty-one books. And I succeeded: here's the list of books I read (a good chunk of which were picture books, but hey—they were great). It was a satisfying project.

I am now considering something similar in honor of my sixty-third birthday—but no, it won't be sixty-three books. Maybe fifty? I don't know. What seems reasonable?

I'll keep mulling that over, but for today, in preparation (I have until tomorrow to iron out the details), I thought I'd skim through New York Times Best 10 Books lists and note down a few that I might like to check out. Starting with this year's:

Autumn, by Ali Smith: "a moving exploration of the intricacies of the imagination, a sly teasing-out of a host of big ideas and small revelations, all hovering around a timeless quandary: how to observe, how to be."

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid: "A deceptively simple conceit turns a timely novel about a couple fleeing a civil war into a profound meditation on the psychology of exile. Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence."

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee: In this novel about four generations of an ethnic Korean family living in Japan, "Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen."

The Power, by Naomi Alderman: "Alderman imagines our present moment—our history, our wars, our politics—complicated by the sudden manifestation of a lethal “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the globe. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss."

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward: "Ward gives us Jojo, a 13-year-old, and a road trip that he and his little sister take with his drug-addicted black mother to pick up their white father from prison. And there is nothing small about their existences. Their story feels mythic, both encompassing the ghosts of the past and touching on all the racial and social dynamics of the South [the story is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi] as they course through this one fractured family. Ward’s greatest feat here is achieving a level of empathy that is all too often impossible to muster in real life, but that is genuine and inevitable in the hands of a writer of such lyric imagination."

The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, by Richard O. Prum: "If a science book can be subversive and feminist and change the way we look at our own bodies—but also be mostly about birds—this is it. . . . Prum wants subjectivity and the desire for beauty to be part of our understanding of how evolution works."

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood: "In this affectionate and very funny memoir, Lockwood weaves the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with her own coming-of-age, and the crisis that later led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. She also brings to bear her gifts as a poet, mixing the sacred and profane in a voice that’s wonderfully grounded and authentic."

And here are the books from earlier lists that I have not read that I might seek out (ones marked with asterisks I already possess, so I might as well start there):

2016

The Association of Small Bombs, by Karan Mahajan*
War and Turpentine, by Stefan Hertmans
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer*
The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar

2015
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin*
The Sellout, by Paul Beatty*
Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald*
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World, by Andrea Wulf*

2014

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr*
Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill*
Euphoria, by Lily King
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Biss

2013
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt*
Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson
Five Days at Memorial: Five Days in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark
Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala

2012

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
Building Stories, by Chris Ware*
The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers
Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story, by Jim Holt

2011
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach*
11/22/63, by Stephen King
Arguably: Essays, by Christopher Hitchens
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by Manning Marable
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman*

2010

Selected Stories, by William Trevor
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddartha Mukherjee*
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson*

Yep, if I simply start with the ones I already own, my list is fourteen books long. But first, I've got to finish three or four that I'm partway through. In short: I need to dedicate some time every day to reading. That's a resolution I can live with. Let the book reports resume!

P.S. Another list I clipped recently that I'll just add here for good measure: Ten Illuminating Books for Confusing Times, published by Zócalo: An ASU Knowledge Enterprise Magazine of Ideas. If I run across any other good ones I'll either add them here or post a new list. So many books, so little time!

P.P.S. 1/18/2020 In the intervening years, I have read exactly two of the books listed above—and acquired a shitload of new ones. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Will I ever?