Terrence Rafferty writes in the New York Times Magazine, 4 May 2003:

The men and women who make films need to put up more resistance to the rising tide of interactivity, because, Casablanca notwithstanding, there's no guarantee that the fundamental things will continue to apply as time goes by. The more "interactive" we allow our experience of art—any art—to become, the less likely it is that future generations will appreciate the necessity of art at all. Interactivity is an illusion of control; but understanding a work of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a provisional surrender to someone else's vision. To put it as simply as possible: If you have to be in total control of every experience, art is not for you. Life probably isn't, either. Hey, where's the alternate ending?

posted: 3:40:38 PM  

Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, a novella by Stanley G. Crawford

Crawford has created two of the more rebarbative male protagonists in twentieth century fiction. The speaker of Some Instructions to My Wife is a home-schooling, home-grown martinet. Unguentine of the present book is a nearly inarticulate yatchsman who converts a barge into a floating self-sufficient world, a sea-going garden, in which he isolates himself and his wife, who narrates.

And yet the book is an interesting read, as it weaves Christian and classical myths into the warp of magic realism. There are the Genesis stories, but I think Unguentine can be most identified with Daedalus (as well as his son Icarus), for his creation of a world that is meant to improve upon the world. Unguentine covers the barge with a dome of glass; he cuts down a grove of forty trees (with charming names like the Fir Irene, the Beech Cynthia, and the Elm Myra) and supplants them with metal facsimiles. After forty years at sea, like Icarus, Unguentine falls to his death, only to rise again in the book's closing chapter.

Mrs. Unguentine comes to stand for the ship itself (he seems to talk to the boat more), the sea, and ultimately the earth. Once the grunting Unguentine has fallen, the barge is not so much run aground as it returns to ground, half-sunken into a wetland, waiting for his return.

All in all, this is a rewarding, if somber, meditation on what it means to tend your garden.

posted: 3:32:59 PM  

Bad Behavior, stories by Mary Gaitskill

The central theme of these quirky stories is a woman taken out of herself by the practice of some (often abusive) taboo. It may be sadism ("Romantic Weekend"), or nitrous oxide in a dentist's chair ("Other Factors"). Prostitution is explored both from woman's viewpoint ("Trying to Be") and from a man's ("Something Nice"). Each story tends to make its point and end abruptly, like—well, you probably get the picture.

"Secretary" was the basis for last year's film. It is a tale of a young woman, with some sort of emotional damage in her past, who is drawn into a humiliating relationship with her employer, a lawyer for whom she types. The film puts a layer of glamour on this sordid story. In print, it's told in the starker first person. The nearly-anonymous narrator is called "Miss Roe" in the final pages by an investigative reporter.

Gaitskill can turn a wry phrase when she needs to. The couple in "Trying to Be" dine in "an expensive eggs Benedict place, with waiters in black pants mincing about as a piped-in symphony identified this as a haven of Western civilization." And the narrator of "Secretary" speaks of a "sickening sensation of love nailed to contempt and panic."

Nevertheless, Gaitskill repeats herself a bit, and stories like "Heaven" could have used a tighter editor's hand.

posted: 2:54:08 PM  

It was cool and misty in the woods, but beginning to turn muggy on the boardwalk. Most of our nest boxes have hatched. We have one, perhaps two still to go.

We heard and or saw Acadian Flycatcher (Empidonax virescens), Northern Parula (Parula americana), Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea), Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe), Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus), Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina), Barred Owl (Strix varia), and Red-Eyed Vireo (Vireo olivaceus). Paul also called a Solitary Sandpiper (Tringa solitaria).

posted: 2:23:46 PM