100 degree heat and humidity is preventing me from sounding like the dainty, measured, ladylike creature I know I can be....BLEGH! I am so FREAKING HOT. I am just not built for this. I am, however, rather enjoying my bad mood, letting it rip. Heaven NOR hell hath no fury like an overheated underairconditioned fat girl.
I had prematurely posted something last week about the new Mary Wesley I was reading to cleanse my palate from the wild bloody ending of the previous. This new one (Part of the Furniture) seemed more conventional, sweet, but then--BLAM. Another one of those MW endings. This one not bloody, just...breathtakingly unconventional. Best analogy I can think of is it's like the world's longest shaggy dog story. Comes hundreds of pages only to stop up short at the most unlikely spot. She was a PERVERSE old Cornish lady and I love her very much for that. I am now on the very last one of hers I haven't read and it is a head-spinning kaleidoscope of honeycombed interpersonal connections--she's laughing at us, spinning coincidence after coincidence.
Oprah has discovered the working poor (last week's re-run with Morgan Spurlock). If I remember correctly she also discovered them with Barbara Ehrenreich, but either way she made it very clear that she thinks none of these people WATCH HER SHOW. "Them" "them" "them"...Yes, them. Us. Them. OhohohohfreakingOprah.
In a slightly similar vein I was reading about a mirco-loan organization recently--a global group that makes $100, $200 loans to people in very poor countries. 98% of the loans are paid back, and within a short period of time. You hear that, Mr. Skilling? Perfectly consistent on a very extreme end with the truth about how loan companies make their money--it's the small to medium loans that are paid back, statistically. It's the ginormous corporate fuckers that default.
There was a really good program this weekend on WE called "You Had to Be There" that was about the ChucknDi royal wedding. It sounds like a holiday-sweater-wearing/teddy-bear-collecting/Precious-Moments-loving sort of affair, but it really wasn't--it was fascinating. For one thing, they interviewed a wide, wide array of people, not all of whom were thrilled with the event (one guy talked about the steaming horse shit in the sun, one violinist said, "it was just another gig"), including Diana's makeup artist, and somebody in the choir, and people who were partying in the streets. It was a strangely effective program that recreated the event really well and to an interesting end that I am still trying to parse out, apart from all the Diana cliches (i.e., one person did say "We believed everything we saw"). I guess partly because as a GenXer there is something about this event that dates us--it *was* more innocent, the last gasp of something. I dunno--there's too much ink spilled about the Meaning of this event for me to sift through the chaff at the moment but there was something very...significant about it all that I believe but can't explain. As ever.
So (also posted this before I had thought it out last week) I guess the real comparison of Unfaithful to L Fatal Attraction lies in the area of female vs. male anger. And yes, duh. Man's being expected and justified and family-saving, woman's being crazed and irrational and destructive. It's so stupid, though. Just sayin.
Armistead Maupin (HELLO...wonder if the Night Listener movie will be any good--it was a darned effective creepy novel) coined the expression "the nervous pursuit of chic" in one of his books (the one after Jon dies--probably Babycakes) and this is a remarkably spot-on term that I love dearly. It has slipped into the front of my brain pan about 12,000 times today. Just noting.
Blimey...CRANKY. Heat + the nervous pursuit of chic = strange animal noises.
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