Futility Now

As huge fans of The Savoy, we’ve been sort of offhandedly considering going to Broder for a while now. In fact, we tried to go there Friday night, but they aren’t open for dinner any more. Hard times all around.

Instead, we went for brunch on Sunday. It was very nice.

As you can see, there’s a bit of a premium on presentation. You might also notice that compared to the somewhat ridiculous portions shoveled at you from any kitchen running before about 4 in the afternoon, there’s a reasonably edible quantity of food here.

The other good thing about the food is that it’s, well, good. Or “well good,” if I were some old limey. At any rate, things were definitely delicious, and having acorn squash instead of potatoes is a cool idea (not that I have anything against potatoes, but variety is the metaphor of cliches, or something.) The bloody mary there is also excellent, although it had a lot of straw-blocking stuff floating around in the bottom of it.

Also, we sat at a counter facing the tiny kitchen, and the one guy who they had doing all the grill work was a real titan. At any rate, we were deeply pleased. The end.

So I think I’ve been tagged to write about Broder (and I will), but I also wanted to talk about the difference in tone between the book and film versions of Let the Right One In.

FWIW: “Spoiler warning,” as the kids say. If you’re the type for whom the plot is central to your appreciation of a work, you may want to go back to the 19th. Century. Furthermore, if this is true of you and you haven’t read or seen Let the Right One In you may want to avoid this post.

It should not surprise anybody that many details of the novel Let the Right One In were dropped for the film version. In fact, there are many reasons to be glad that they were. In an age where people feel like we need 2+ hours to understand the finer points of fucking Iron Man, a film that tells a complete story while letting itself in at under that 2 hour mark is a feat in itself.

Snideness aside, the trimming was well done and, I think, fairly symmetrical. Also, you will note that while all flashbacks were omitted, there were a couple of brief flashes, confusing if you haven’t read the book (which I hadn’t when I saw the movie), that acknowledge the events from those flashbacks.

In contrast to this, none of the episodes from Hakan’s (sorry, not going to go looking for the right escape code) past get any reference at all. In the absence of further information, it is easy to get the impression that Hakan started his life as a guy just like Oskar, and, by extension, that Oskar will one day be just like Hakan. Hazel and I both left the theater with this impression, and even if it were not the original intention of the film maker, it must have been accepted at some point.

I’m pretty sure that this makes the movie superior to the book. While the book is full of gruesome details, and many of the characters are substantially less likable, it still ends with a restoration of moral order. By contrast, the end of the film is incredibly bleak in a way that I found very moving. I think that it showed a little more courage (although it really took a dive on adhering to the fat-people-can’t-be-protagonists rule.)

We have a lot of catching up to do.

The weather, just so you know, is exquisite today.  It poured rain and hail overnight and through the morning.  jmags was up all night (as is oft the case) and was able to enjoy it then (except for the time he spent with his headphones on, during which I am just guessing he continued to lament the death of rock and roll by watching youtube videos of ye good olde days), but I crashed early and so woke early. I stayed in bed reading and listening to the storminess of things and feeling very smug at how nice it was to be bundled in feathers and down next to 6’4″ of warmth.

After the storm came the rest of today — alternately slightly drizzly and grey and then very very bright with fluffy clouds, and lots of wind regardless.

When jmags did wake, and we’d finished doing all of the things that one does on a Sunday morning before getting up, we decided to go to Broder for breakfast.  (jmags will tell you more about that soon, I’m sure.) Even better than the meal we shared — and that’s saying quite a lot — was the walk afterward.  It was full of skittish cats, phosphorescent moss, and stunning old cars in various states of disrepair.  These are most certainly a few of my favorite things.

So, then, that takes care of today.  I don’t think it will behoove either of us if I go into the same detail about each of the days since my last post, but I will give some of the highlights:

1) I found another house to covet, a house that strongly conjures Villa Villekulla.  Then it sold.  The important thing is that I’ve discovered Villa Villekulla is the model for what I do, in fact, want in a house, and really has been for awhile, I just somehow hadn’t figured it out.  Rangy, quirky, old, tall, somewhat ramshackle.

2) I finished out another trimester of classes this week.  Tomorrow I begin with just Drawing and Ceramics — no English — so my grading between now and the end of the year is roughly nil.  I will miss my Senior Honors goslings, it’s true.  But not so much that I think I’d change things.  Upon request, as a parting gift, I recited a bit of Beowulf in Old English to them: beowulf1

3) I’ve started a class in wheel-throwing, and it’s going very well, thank you for asking. Photos eventually.

4) I’ve also been doing a fair amount of handbuilding with clay at home. Think hedgehogs and eyeballs:

5) Read & saw Let the Right One In. Loved film, liked book very much.  Also read some bad fantasy w/ jmags, and we’ve started reading Robinson Jeffers’s “Cawdor” aloud.  I love & admire this poem; I found it on accident over the summer, as it was paired with his rendering of “Medea” (also a knockout). I teach “Medea” & was looking for alternate tellings at the time.  In fact, I think “Cawdor” deserves a post of its own.  We’ll see about that.

6) Last weekend, sang karaoke and went roller skating for my sister’s birthday.  Whoa.

7) Did some fairly marvelous cooking — chocolate hazelnut brownies, & bread pudding.

This week looks to be quieter, at least until Thursday.  I hope to read and to do some drawing, since I haven’t done any at all since the fall.  If I do stay in as planned, I also hope to find you here to consider some of the finer points of “Cawdor.”  I recommend you pick up a copy in the meantime.

So I finally gave up on The Captive. I couldn’t take any more and gave the last 30 pages or so only the most cursory skimming. Even that was exhausting and, frankly, kind of degrading. I would say that of the many books that I’ve read that are counted amongst literature’s shining lights, this is the worst. By a wide margin.

Presumably The Fugitive will be an improvement if for no other reason that there needs to be something new for Marcel to complain about without Albertine. Still, I think I’m going to take a little break to avoid accidentally counting my lingering resentments against the new volume.

I have been reading Lovecraft on Wikisource. At some point early in this endeavor (before I had put 2 and 2 together to realize that Wikisource’s URLs would be just like Wikipedia’s) I tried to search for “wikisource lovecraft” in Firefox’s built-in search bar. As you may or may not know, the FF search bar tries to offer helpful suggestions once you start typing text into it. Once you get to about “wikis” it has suggested “wikisource,” which is pretty much par for the course, but the second suggestion is “wikisource catullus.”

Now I know that this probably (which is to say, almost certainly) means that most people who go to Wikisource are taking a Latin class, but deep down I’d like to think the world is full of people seeking the most venal and lurid pornography that antiquity has to offer.