Jane: Here, there, everywhere

Hugh Dancy and Maria Bello in Robin Swicord’s film version of “The Jane Austen Book Club.”

So much of Jane Austen's work revolved around finding men of means to marry young women whose families were in fairly desperate financial straits. Rather than spinning in her grave at the knockoffs of her books, Jane must be smiling at the number of women who have profited from marketing their own takes on her stories.
Are you a secret Jane Austen fan? Did you love Alicia Silverstone's well-intentioned meddling in the movie “Clueless”? Is Bridget Jones one of your guilty pleasures?
The first is a hilarious contemporary Beverly Hills update of Austen's Emma, and Bridget is a direct descendant of the young Austen heroines longing for love above their social station. Amy Heckerling wrote and directed Clueless; Sharon Maguire directed and Helen Fielding wrote the novel and the screen play. A guy, Guy Andrews, wrote time-traveling Lost in Austen, but two women produced the mini-series for Britain's ITV. It's available on DVD and worth seeing for the fun of watching a modern Austen devotee suddenly transported to the plot of Pride and Prejudice, and trying to manipulate the outcome.
Karen Joy Fowler's novel The Jane Austen Book Club captures the Austen spirit beautifully, gleefully. The Davis author considerately provides an appendix guide to the Austen novels for the non-devotee. You don't need it to appreciate this sly and charming tale of six months with a California Central Valley book club that's "All Jane Austen, all the time." Robin Swicord directed and wrote the screenplay with Fowler.
Relationships end and begin, strawberries and margaritas are consumed in the summer heat, and the five women and one man reveal themselves in their reactions to the novels.
Bernadette, at 67 the oldest member, (and the funniest)has officially given up on romance; she wears mismatched socks and pulls off a surprising coup. Allegra, the lesbian, focuses on Austen's writing “about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Jane Austen in the horror section." Jocelyn, the never-married dog breeder and born match-maker, finds herself captivated by an unexpected match and by science fiction/fantasy (which Fowler also writes).
Veteran book-clubbers will appreciate the intimacy and loving support that triumph over occasional exasperation with each other.
There's a superficial resemblance to that other novel of Central Valley women, How to Make an American Quilt, but this is far richer, as post-modern meta-fiction should be.

If those don't satisfy your Austen hunger,there is always the 2007 Becoming Jane, an imagining of a possible romance gone awry. Jane (Anne Hathaway) has already decided to earn her living by writing when she meets dashing young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), who takes a far bolder and more direct approach to romance than typical Austen suitors.
It's great fun to watch a fine cast-- especially Maggie Smith -- shape-shift into the memorable Austen characters. Just don't take it too seriously.

Hiatus

No update this week -- instead I'd like to refer you to a very interesting column from the Santa Barbara Noozhawk, a favorite independent site.

http://www.noozhawk.com/conklin_wayman/article/012410_cinema_in_focus_15th_anniversary/#comments

What do you think of their approach?

I'm having back problems, hope to be back soon.

Weeds running rampant

In Weeds' first season on Showtime, Jenji Kohan took an offbeat look at marijuana in Agrestic, an upscale Southern California subdivision of pseudo-Spanish houses. A suddenly widowed young soccer mom, Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker), plunges into dealing so she can keep herself and her family of two boys in the affluent style to which they have been accustomed.

Her customers include an accountant and city councilman, Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), his attorney pal Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), and students at nearby Valley College.

Nancy's adventures with her supplier and expanding her business share the spotlight with the consumerism and competition of a town where everybody seems to be friends and enemies simultaneously. Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) supplies much of that melodramatic energy as PTA president and a very mean-spirited mother.

It was Showtime's highest-rated series in its first year. If only it had quit then.

By the time the fifth season ended, it had become very dark, a series of murders, rapes, shootouts and intrigues of violent rival cartels and Mexican politics.

Nancy, who had earlier married a DEA agent who was soon killed, now has had a baby by and is married to a Mexican drug kingpin and politician, Esteban Reyes. played by Demian Bichir, who's known as the George Clooney of Mexico. He's the mayor of Tijuana and running for governor. His glamorous woman campaign manager has threatened to have her older two sons killed, because "we don't need them for our pretty pictures." One of those sons promptly bashed her in the head with a croquet mallet and we last saw her face down in a swimming pool, blood spreading.

Season six is due to start airing in July. Can it possibly still be funny when we know that 18,000 people have died in the drug wars since the end of 2006 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against cartels? When we know the violence is no longer confined to the border towns? It has escalated, just as the Weeds plot and sub-plots have.

For a comedy, it has become seriously not funny. There doesn't seem to be any logical way to end this saga except operatically, with corpses littering the screen.

Saludes, San Patricio!

Beach at San Patricio-Melaque

Maybe you're waiting until Wednesday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they've already started the annual week-long party in San Patricio, Jalisco, on Mexico's Pacific coast. This year they may be listening to the new Chieftains album San Patricio, a fusion of Irish and Mexican music.
http://www.irishcentral.com/IrishAmerica/The-March-of-the-Forgotten-87237152.html?page=1
The visiting gringos are certainly drinking Jamieson's and getting misty-eyed as they retell the story of the brave Irish martyrs who fought with Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Like so much of conventional wisdom, quite a bit of it is wrong, or at least questionable.

“No, the San Patricio soldiers couldn't have settled in the town. None of them survived,” a Mexican scholar told me. But some did,escaping the fate of being hanged as deserters by the United States Army. There may have been only a handful, but a few of them accepted the Mexican government's offer of land grants and quietly settled into the country.

The popular story, as recounted in the movie One Man's Hero, is that when the Irish soldiers entered Mexico with the U.S. Army they found themselves fighting people just like themselves: Catholic villagers. And so they defected to the Mexican Army, which would be led by General Santa Anna, who had conquered the Alamo 10 years earlier.

And why were there Irish in the U.S. Army? They had come to America to escape famine at home, booking passage on a ship to New Orleans because the fare was cheaper than to other ports such as New York. There was little work available, and much resentment, and so they joined the Army in Texas.

The deserters weren't all Irish. The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Batallón de San Patricio) included Canadians, Scots, English and several European nationalities, as well as some African-Americans who had escaped slavery in the South; one of the issues in that war was the Texan desire to maintain slavery and the Mexican ban on it. Mexico offered more incentives than sentimental attachment to villages and religion – citizenship, higher pay and promises of land. There may have been as few as 175, or as many as several hundred. (There's that slippery history again.) Mexico has long honored the battalion in ceremonies in Mexico City's San Jacinto Plaza on September 12, the anniversary of the executions. In 1997 then-President Ernesto Zedillo commemorated the 150th anniversary of the executions.

Besides the truly awful One Man's Hero,there are a few other page and screen sources of this little-known chapter of history. Some claim the story was suppressed by the United States government,which may be true.

Among them are Mark Day's documentary The San Patricios (1996)-- that's a still from the documentary at left.

The Irish in America, a History Channel production available at Blockbuster and Amazon.
PBS also did a series called the Irish in America. Unfortunately, the site has been retired.
Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War, author Robert Ryal Miller, history.
50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: by Mickey Z, political history.
Saint Patrick's Battalion, by Carl Krueger, historical novel.

The only San Patricio in Mexico (which tends to give many towns the same name), it's properly known as San Patricio-Melaque-Barra de Navidad. The three towns face the Bahia de Navidad and are deservedly popular as a destination for snowbirds and Mexican tourists, for their natural beauty and great variety of accommodations and restaurants.

Melaque also seems to be the only town of its name in the Republic. Some say it's a derivation of malarkey, slang for nonsense, probably a British origin. (And maybe it's from a pre-conquest indigenous language.) Some also say that gringo is derived from the song Green Grow the Rushes, O, by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, sung by the surviving soldiers as they marched along the beach. More on that theory at http://celtic-cadences.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/green-grow-the-rashes-o-lyrics-robert-burns-texas-scotland-mexican-gringo-american-ancestry-genealogy-6535224/

A pretty story, isn't it?

If you're looking for more light-hearted Irish movies, check the January post Irish spring some surprises.

Who should we celebrate this month?

You've probably heard that March is International Women's Month. In the United States we are invited to a lot of events celebrating that and urging more attention to women's rights and accomplishments, but maybe we need to look at some other things.
 "We don't want a bigger piece of the pie.  The pie is poisoned," author Kate Millett told a gathering of California feminists in the early 1970s.  Meanwhile, out in the halls, noisy wrangling was going on over whether the group was dominated by middle-class white women and ignoring women of color, the working class and lesbians.  It was.

Around the world, women don't seem to be trying to crack the glass ceiling in politics and corporations; too many are just trying to survive. Several of their stories are told in the 2004 documentary film The Corporation. The filmmakers have generously posted the entire film at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87 and it's available from Netflix or for purchase or lease from http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/ both for private use and for public showings. It's also on Hulu, with limited commercial interruptions, http://www.hulu.com/watch/118169/the-corporation

In India, women have led the fight to end laws against saving crop seeds. Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist, is a leader in that effort to preserve an ancient and money-saving tradition and in making water available without corporate control. See her interview with Bill Moyers at www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_shiva.html

In Canada, Maude Barlow has been leading the water fight for many years and opposing free trade agreements which let global corporations control the necessities of life. Grit TV has a good recent interview with her: http://www.grittv.org/2010/02/24/maude-barlow-water-on-the-brain/

By far the most compelling interviews in the film are with the teenage girls who work in sweatshops for U.S-based corporations making our clothes for pennies a day. In 1996, when a human rights organization visited a Honduras sweatshop owned by actress Kathie Lee Gifford, intimidating company security men watched the interviews. The girls surreptitiously gave their pay stubs to the visitors, which led to a federal investigation. Whether Gifford is still exploiting child workers is in dispute, but there's no question that many clothing manufacturers continue to do so.

It's not all bad news. Carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets is a convert to sustainability, and has called himself “a plunderer” of resources in speeches to other industrial leaders. He has also reported that the company is doing very well with its new environmentally friendly practices. We need to educate and encourage more men like him, help them to make better pies.

Director has her own rhythm

You may never have heard of Darnell Martin, but you've probably seen her work as director of several episodes of Law and Order and other popular TV shows.  Television directors just don't get the same attention as film directors, and women in the business rarely get much attention except as actresses. She's been working in the business since the 1980s at first as second assistant camera on  Do the Right Thing, and as a writer, learning her craft with hands-on experience.

A couple of things about Martin are striking. When she made her1994 feature debut, I Like It Like That, she was the first African-American woman to direct a studio feature - certainly an attention-getting distinction, and she didn't want a big deal made of it.  She told American Visions magazine "It pisses me off . . . I wasn't thinking about trying to do something politically correct. I was trying to follow the human beats. My foremost interest in filmmaking is about character, about the environment of my characters. I wasn't trying to do a film about Latinos or women or anything like that. I just tried to make a film about people." 

Her feature films seem (at least to me) to have a documentary flair. The 2005 Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a Zora Neale Hurston novel, tells us almost as much about life in an all-Black Florida town in the 1920s as about one woman's search for love and respect. And of course the 2008 Cadillac Records is rooted in the reality of 1950s Chicago blues, with all its raunchiness and exploitation. Several reviews seemed particularly vicious and petty, with complaints like "Beyoncé Knowles doesn't look anything like Etta James."  (Oh, please!) It's the music that matters, and the music is great in this overview of Chess Records and the movement of "race music" into the mainstream. Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle gets it: "A good general rule is that if one performance is good, credit the actor. But if everyone in the movie is doing excellent work, this is no coincidence. This is the product of superior direction."

Martin is identified as a pioneer of black film, which has a 100-year history in the United States - kind of funny when you think that she was born in 1964 in the Bronx. "There would be no Denzel Washington without Sidney Poitier and no Sidney Poitier without Paul Robeson . . . no Gina Prince-Bythewood without Darnell Martin" writes Nsenga K. Burton Ph.D. at http://www.theroot.com/views/celebrating-100-years-black-cinema-0 which is altogether worth reading.

Martin has not announced any upcoming film projects, but has scheduled a couple of episodes of Happy Town  and one of Mercy for 2010.

The lovable horrormeister

There are several endearing things about Stephen King. When he suspects there's a monster in the closet he opens the door to face it head on. His stories, even when they focus on boys and men, often include a brave and resourceful woman, or a little girl, as in the 1999 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. A few of his novels could well be considered feminist.

With a new book just out from Simon & Schuster,UR, first available only on the Kindle e-reader, and the Pocket Books re-issue of the 1980 Danse Macabre it's a good time to look at this very prolific and very successful author. UR expands his suspicion (shared by many of us) that our technological toys have a dark side - the e-book reader opens worlds we didn't suspect and don't much like. It's not a new idea; Lewis Carroll did much the same; Alice's adventures in Wonderland were not entirely pleasant.
He has done it before with cars (Christine and From a Buick 8), household appliances (Maximum Overdrive), the cell phone (Cell) and exercise equipment (Stationary Bike). (Why he hasn't treated the home computer as a possible source of unspeakable horror is beyond me.)

Danse Macabre, a long-time favorite of mine, explores the horror theme in folktales and mythology for a University of Maine class on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." Pocket Books will publish a reprint with a 2010 foreword on February 23. It's one of the most accessible and entertaining treatments of the subject, and certainly worth reading now when our television and movie screens drip with the gore of romanticized werewolves, zombies and vampires.

King has been derided by many critics and sneered at both by literary authors whose work wasn't doing so well and by timid readers who preferred romantic fairy tales with guaranteed happy endings.

He doesn't always hit the bull's-eye, and sometimes the quality is all over the place in the same book. His work often seems to be produced by two distinct personalities, one a kid enamored of ripping yarns, the other a thoughtful, even spiritual, adult. It's a topic he has dealt with in Duma Key, The Dark Half and in his autobiographical On Writing, in which he discusses his years of addiction to drugs and booze.

In The Dark Half his writer protagonist is forced to confront his own demons and darkness. In Duma Key a construction worker loses his right arm, and gains artistic and psychic abilities which would be surprising anywhere but in a King book. Both have mesmerizing sections on the sources of creativity, as well as passages I'd just as soon skip on horrors and creepy crawlies. That's not because they scare me – they don't, in fact, I usually find them pretty amusing – but because they seem shallow next to his explorations of relationships and the psyche.
The latter gives us much of the weight of the horrific history of a pioneer Florida family, and some far more cheerful little gems on creation, titled How to Draw a Picture. They could just as well be called How to Write, or How to Live. Samples:
I: “Start with a blank surface.
IV: “Start with what you know, then reinvent it.”
XI: “Don't quit until the picture's complete. . . . Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.”

Find lots more at his website, http://www.stephenking.com/index.html

Doc workers

For most of them it's a labor of love.  They know they won't get the audiences or the media coverage of feature films, or even be shown in many theaters. Many times documentary filmmakers don't even recoup the costs of production. They are not part of the Hollywood dream machine, letting us escape into the happy endings of romantic comedies or the cathartic adventures of fictional adventure and the supernatural.

Instead, they ask us to look at reality -- or at least the reality of the filmmaker -- and they're not popular with theater managers, who schedule films they think will attract young audiences looking for great special effects and lots of explosions.  In my community, we've had to lobby for theater showings of Michael Moore films, and we've had some success with that. The chain that runs the single multiplex in the county didn't think there was an audience for Moore's political films, but the manager responded to numerous requests and got respectable audiences.

The finalists in documentary features for this year's Academy Awards are Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, The Cove, Food, Inc., The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, and Which Way Home.

We've seen some of them at an underground venue, a monthly series run by a local woman who starts her fourth year of showings this month. She has tried showing a couple of feature films, but "they're just not wanted."  Her biggest audiences, 80-plus people, were for a locally made film by and about the Native Americans of the area and for Moore's Sicko. 

The opportunity to discuss films is as big a draw as the chance to see them, she says.  You don't get that in your living room unless you've invited a bunch of friends over for potluck and a DVD.  It makes me yearn for the big city art-house theaters with their lobby tables and espresso bars to encourage conversation.

The Cove, about a Japanese village where dolphins are ruthlessly captured for the tourist industry and killed for their meat, didn't do so well in the local showings, with an audience of only 12.  Perhaps that's because it's available on Netflix.

So is Food, Inc., which compares the pastoral image of farms promoted by the food industry with the reality of the industrial factories which dominate food production. 

The wider availability is reportedly affecting film festivals, a primary venue for the docs. A worldwide economic slump is certainly part of the reason for lower attendance, but another factor is the Internet.  Time- and cash-strapped distributors can find enough information on YouTube and other sites to make decisions without trekking to the festivals.

Which leaves the rest of us in small and rural communities to our own resources and their sometimes questionable legality. There are filmmakers who urge us to show their work to as many people as possible -- and others warn us that Interpol and the FBI are watching and we could be liable for steep fines. Maybe we should be lobbying for nominal distribution fees when our venues are the local senior center or a church.

Foodies expand beyond cookbooks

We've had a strong - perhaps unhealthy - focus on food for many years in this country, maybe because we have such an abundance and variety compared with most of the world. That focus has changed in the last few years from gourmet meals and the latest trendy recipes cooked up by the foodies to a concentration on local and healthy, driven in large part by authors like Alice Waters and Barbara Kingsolver.

The latest food guru is Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley, who has just produced Food Rules. Some examples:

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

#64: Break the rules once in a while.

His earlier books are In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, winner of the James Beard Award, and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both the New York Times and the Washington Post; a young readers' version of The Omnivore's Dilemma: the Secrets Behind What You Eat; Second Nature, The Botany of Desire, and A Place of My Own. Pollan appears in Food, Inc., a documentary film on the food industry, and The Botany of Desire, recently broadcast on PBS. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Pollan doesn't like the dependence on corn as an ingredient in many prepared foods, he does like local production and buying and farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia, another foe of industrialized farming. There's a good recent interview with Salatin at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/31/food-industry-environment

Our damaging dependence on oil has much to do with the current shift in food concerns. It's estimated that much of what we eat travels 1500 miles to our tables, a huge consumption of energy that might be better used to heat and light our homes.

An epidemic of obesity is also a huge factor, with fast food being blamed for much of it. Morgan Spurlock's Super-size Me, about his very fattening month of eating only fast food, was a breakout hit at the 2004 Sundance Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

This year, the Los Angeles Times says Robert Kenner's Oscar nominee Food, Inc., evokes the muckraking advocacy journalism of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. That's because some of the problems with early 20th century food production haven't gone away, he said. "It's shocking to see how far backward we've gone" in policing what we put in our mouths, he said.

A casualty of the new foods sensibility has been Gourmet magazine, shutting down after 70 years.

At the very least, the new food rules should give us second thoughts about what we snack on at the movies.

A painful pursuit of happiness

In her 1977 novel, "The Women's Room," Marilyn French raged against men and had her protagonist find a kind of happiness in earning her Ph.D. in English lit at Harvard, and in a circle of friends as angry as she was.  In her final novel (she died in May, 2009 at age 79), her protagonist finds happiness by insisting that she will be happy and by returning to what some would consider very traditional feminine roles of raising and cooking food.

"The Women's Room" sold 21 million copies worldwide, striking a spark with women who felt abused in misogynistic marriages or furious because their husbands had dumped them for younger women.

It's a classic of feminist literature, although a very bleak one. In the ‘70s, the media discovered the male midlife crisis, which often involved acquiring a new "trophy wife," to replace the one who helped them achieve some success. Apparently they had not heard about millennia of tribal life, which often included polygamy, or about concubines or the mistresses of many royals.

The contrast between French's first and last novels reminds me of nothing so much as the famous Freud quote: "The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" (From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, by Ernest Jones, 1953.)

Love Children (from The Feminist Press at the City University of New York), is set in the  '60s and up to 1976. French has dropped her protagonist, Jess, back into traditional women's roles -- farming and cooking a la Alice Waters-- to find her bliss. There's nothing wrong with farming and cooking, so I'm left wondering a few things: Is she being ironic? Was what she wanted all along just for women in those traditional fields to get a full measure of respect? Does she want us to notice that different women, and men, at different times in their lives, might want something new?Jess is an interesting character. Born in 1953, she'd have been 23 as the book ends -- perhaps a bit young to have packed in all the experience French recounts. But there is a lot of chronological confusion here, which could have benefited from some heavy editing and fact-checking at the Feminist Press. For instance, Jess is convinced that it was her generation alone which stopped the Vietnam War.

There were many reasons that war ended, and many people involved in ending it, including the-then chairman of the Bank of America, Louis B. Lundborg. In 1970 he told the country "An end to the war would be good, not bad, for American business. War is, as we would say in business, a low-yield operation." Then we got serious about getting out.
As she approached 80, French was interviewed on the PBS program Life 2. She said there were compensations for growing old, that one is no longer bound by the anguishes of youth. "Adolescence... the first job... not knowing how to act, not knowing how people felt about you, wondering if you fit in or not." At a certain age, you no longer care, she says. "What is there to be afraid of anymore?"That's a comforting thought, and it's a shame it isn't better expressed in "Love Children."

Crash course on Haiti

Voodoo, AIDS, Creole food, sex tourism – that's what most of us know about Haiti. It's not much help today in understanding why the island nation is in such desperate straits after an earthquake, and with so few of its own resources to care for its people.

The reasons are many and complicated, starting with the 1804 slave revolt against France which made it the first African-American republic in the New World. Then you've got colonialism, imperialism, over-population, dreadful education and health care, deforestation, inappropriate architecture – pacts with the devil don't enter the list.

One of the best resources is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond (New York : Viking, 2005.) the chapter One island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: the Dominican Republic and Haiti explains it: Crippling reparations paid to France after independence, isolation as a French-speaking nation in a Spanish-speaking region, the brutal reign of the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, from 1956 to 1986. The Duvaliers followed an invasion by US Marines in 1915 which created years of repression of political dissent, and American-installed puppet rulers.

Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and the forthcoming book Natural Experiments of History.  Diamond was on Forum, the NPR show, Thursday, Jan.21 . Check their schedule for the podcast: http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/forum/


For more recent history, see the story by John Maxwell of the Jamaica Observer at http://www.counterpunch.org

Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York : Seven Stories Press, [2005]) includes Diplomacy by death squad.

Avengers of the New World : The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois,

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

In a remarkable year in which the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence collided with the undeniable recognition that Haitian politics are still being shaped by outside forces, Harvard University Press launched a retelling of the events and individuals who engineered the Haitian Revolution. Dubois (Michigan State Univ.) emphasizes the impact of French revolutionary principles (i.e., the Rights of Man) on the Haitian rebel slaves, as well as the inextricable influence of French politics on the fate of its Caribbean colony.

Haitian Book Centre was

founded in 1977 to spread Haitian culture in the United States. Their inventory consists of all the classics of Haitian literature plus all the newly published titles by Haitian authors here and abroad and can be browsed online. They carry numerous categories, including children's books, art, history and fiction. Their major customers are university and public libraries. Worth browsing, especially the tempting collection of Images of Haiti.

Haitian-born Edwige Danticat, now a Miami resident, has a breath-taking number of books and awards:

• Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel, 1994)

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  Krik? Krak! (stories, 1996)
  
  
  
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  The Farming of Bones (novel, 1998)
  
  
  
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  Behind the Mountains (young adult novel, 2002, part of the First Person Fiction series)
  
  
  
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  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (travel book, 2002)
  
  
  
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  The Dew Breaker (novel-in-stories,2004)
  
  
  
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  Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (young adult novel, 2005, part of The Royal Diaries series)
  
  
  
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  Brother, I'm Dying (memoir/social criticism, 2007)
  
  
  
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  The Butterfly's Way (anthology editor)
  
  
  

Danticat wrote the foreword to Tram Nguyen's book, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11.

She also wrote a foreword for the Harper Perennial edition of Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and for Pesea Book's Starting With I: Personal Essays By Teenagers, edited by Andrea Estepa.

Danticat wrote the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's novel, 'The Kingdom of this World', describing the legacy of revolution and its flaws. In 2009 she received the MacArthur Genius Award.

Much fiction and film on Haiti is, frankly, pretty cheesy. If you're in the mood for that, try The Comedians, best known for starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in an illicit affair (again?) but with a fine performance by Alec Guinness. Screenplay from his book by Graham Green (and of course the book is better.)

For how to create zombies, there's The Serpent and the Rainbow, from a much-criticized book by anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis, Ph. D., who spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. Serious stuff about medicinal plants; director Wes Craven has turned it into some pretty fine cheap thrills and nervous giggles. Stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist and Zakes Mokae as Peytraud, the delightfully evil priest and chief of the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's dreaded secret police.

A gallant Soviet trickster

Traveler,teacher, gardener, cook, publisher and now novelist (novella-ist?) Barbara Baer of Forestville in west Sonoma County finds beauty, even comedy, in the darkest oppressive days of the late Soviet Union.

Grisha the Scrivener, based on a man she knew during her time of teaching there in Tashkent and Georgia, carries the tale of  “our miserable Russian century” in this heart-breaking and laugh-making tale. An exiled Georgian journalist, he seems to embody the spirit of the samizdat, the underground  self-published literature and news which brave dissidents passed on by hand. They were the Internet of that brutally controlled society.
Ghost Road Press of Denver published it.
Grisha, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, hangs on to hope through imprisonment, TB, through 26 years by clinging to a fragile private life which can't be touched by the government – occasional decent food, love, family and friends. His life is a reminder of the German song Die Gedanken sind Frei, thoughts are free. (English versions by Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and others are on YouTube,)
Baer told Sara Peyton of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “In life the real Grisha, whose name was Guivi, was such a trickster, such a bundle of contradictions, such an odd man and such a dishonest man, that he became my muse. He's not real-to-life anymore than any character is, but when he died I just couldn't let him die in my imagination. I read and reread the last letters he wrote to me in desperation during the civil war but I couldn't do anything to help him and that always stayed with me. So I gave him a longer life.”

Baer appropriately introduced Grisha the Scrivener at the September 2009 Sonoma County Book Festival, of which she has been a major supporter.
A graduate of Stanford University in English Lit, she has long been passionate about pomegranates; her Floreant Press in 2006 published Pomegranate Roads:  A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, by Dr. Gregory Levin, a botanist who trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates for more than 40 years,. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he was exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates.
Floreant, at http://www.floreantpress.com/index.htm also has published memoirs and collections of memorable writing by California women.
A tireless traveler, Baer also has taught in India and recently celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris.

Have cleaver, will travel

Obsessive author Julie Powell, whose blog about a year of cooking  Julia Child's recipes became a popular movie, has a new obsession - butchery - and a new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession.
Women of a certain age loved the film Julie and Julia for the sparkling performances by Meryl Streep as Julia, Jane Lynch as her sister and Stanley Tucci as Julia's appreciative husband.  We worried about demure Amy Adams, working so hard as Julie. And there was the nostalgia for the post-war days when Julia started cooking (my English companion gasped "oh, real butter!") and the '60s when we started cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
There were some murmurs of sympathy at the time for her husband, Eric, who was portrayed as just a little miffed at all the attention he wasn't getting from his cooking/blogging wife. Reactions to the new book are less polite.  Critics are calling it a bloodbath, boring, clumsy, self-obsessed, embarrassing.  Okay, the briefest possible synopsis:  Success, infidelity, butchering, divorce, tell all in too much detail.  TMI du jour.
Dare we hope this signals an end to the dear diary confessional memoir by people with nothing much to say?
My review of the movie:  http://lakeconews.com/content/view/10164/42/

Bordering on madness

Thriller writer T. Jefferson Parker (at left) , a Southern California native, focuses on the gun suppliers on our border with Mexico for his new novel, Iron River. Los Angeles Times reporter Tim Rutten reviews it in the January 6 LAT books features.

And in today's San Diego Union,

Mater Dei student slain in Mexico

Teen gunned down in car near home

(If I hadn't sworn never to use the phrase “ripped from the headlines” this would be an appropriate place for it.)
Rutten writes: “Parker has said elsewhere that, because of its lax gun laws and indifference to their consequences south of the border, he considers the United States 'complicit' in Mexico's current agonies. 'Iron River' makes that point without a moment's descent into the didactic. This is gripping literary entertainment with a point.”

Mexican gun laws may also be partly responsible. The 1917 Constitution guarantees the right of Mexican citizens to own guns but subsequent amendments make it next to impossible for the average person - therefore, smuggling thrives.

The late author Gary Jennings (Aztec, and much more) once wrote to me in response to a fan letter that he had smuggled a rifle in for a farmer neighbor who wanted to shoot wolves and other predators which were killing his sheep.

No doubt I'll have more to say once I've read the book. Mexico, and my friends there from several years as an ex-pat, are never far from my heart and mind.

Growing old grumpily

A lot of us know Duane Jackson from “The Last Picture Show” (1971), which introduced him as a very young man growing up in a dusty and dying Texas town - "Anarene, Texas, 1951, Nothing much has changed..."

We followed him through Larry McMurtry's novels set in Anarene/Thalia/Archer City as everything in oilman Duane's life changed with the fluctuations of the oil business.  Archer City's real, and the author's hometown, where he still lives. We can deduce that much of Duane's story is McMurtry's; although the author never became a super-rich oilman, he did become rich and famous through his writing, and won an Academy Award for the script of Broke Back Mountain, written with Diana Ossana, his life and writing companion for several years now.
Duane is elderly in Rhino Ranch, McMurtry is 73.  Both have had heart attacks. Both have an openly hostile relationship with the tiny hometown (pop. 1,800), according to D (for Dallas) magazine.  That's easy to understand when you read Duane's remarks about people who never read a book and consider that McMurtry  has imported one of the world's largest collections of books into the little town.

They're as exotic as the African rhinos imported into Thalia by billionairess K.K. Slater, who thinks they'll make a dandy tourist attraction.
Duane is even more depressed than he was in the last Thalia book, Duane's Depressed, in which his lesbian psychotherapist insisted he visit Egypt to cheer up after a heart attack. An odd choice, given the country's focus on death, but it did once have a giant library in Alexandria.  At the time, McMurtry said it was his last book about the dusty little town.  He says that again about this one.

He's interested in the Rhino Ranch, and especially in one of its occupants, the 3,500 pound rhino that frequently walks with him, which he calls Double Aught (the name of the largest size of buckshot.) One day the rhino just disappears.  So do a young former porn star who takes up with him briefly, and a San tribesman Slater imports to tend the animals. 

Duane doesn't give any of the disappearances much thought; things come, things go.  He has quite a Zen attitude to life and has become fairly reclusive, spending much of his time at an isolated cabin, having the occasional laconic conversations with his old pals and the occasional dinner (chicken fried steak with cream gravy-that can't be good for a bad heart) in the town's one pretty bad restaurant.

Considering the protagonist's apparent exhaustion and lack of interest in much of anything, it's surprisingly fun to read, and ponder whether that huge rhinoceros is a symbol for the weight of history.  McMurtry has said frequently that in writing his stories of the old West he wanted to de-mythologize its heroic image. That hasn't worked very well, but if you haven't read his early efforts it's worth catching up with Lonesome Dove and the dynamically aging Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment and Evening Star. They're excellent movies too, with Shirley Maclaine as Aurora and Jack Nicholson as her ex-astronaut lover.

The Irish spring some surprises

Who would expect marijuana and homosexuality to pop up in Irish movies? Their wit is no surprise, but it's usually applied to subjects like wakes, priests and the lottery.
In How About You the reluctant temporary manager of a home for some cranky old folks finds a way to make the holidays merry without alcohol. The outstanding cast includes Vanessa Redgrave.
Goldfish Memory follows the adventures of contemporary young Dubliners exploring their options in that beautiful city.
That title? Supposedly, goldfish have a memory only three seconds long so everything is always fresh and new. But how would anyone know?

Sherlock Holmes, new and old

Brilliant idea of Guy Ritchie's to to give us the young and active Holmes and Watson, especially as Robert Downey Jr. is one of our very best physical actors.  Can't wait to see it! Preview online at http://sherlock-holmes-movie.warnerbros.com/

Another favorite version of the great detective is Laurie R. King's in her Mary Russell series, in which teenage Mary trips over the retired Holmes, becomes his apprentice and later his wife. Mystery, romance, extremely palatable early 20^th century history (and trustworthy – King is a meticulous researcher.) The series begins with The Beekeeper's Apprentice, but start anywhere-- you'll catch up. The author's site at http://www.laurierking.com/ is well worth reading. Mystery: Why has no one adapted any of King's books to film? It can't be prejudice against old man-young woman stories.