Echoes and Reflections

I am halfway through Byatt’s new book, The Children’s Book, and I love it. I stayed up late last night to get through some more chapters. Now, I want to stop reading it to delay the pleasure of having more of it left to read. So, to sort of fulfill that desire and to start thinking more critically about her new book – which I am finding an interesting sort of departure from her other material – I was stroke by this strand of the novel that corresponded to this movie I have recently been obsessed with, Reds. Also, how this one character Charles/Karl talks about the poor makes me think about my own relationship to the visible homeless, poor, and destitute of the streets. (Which is just so uncanny and weird. It is like all of these things in life start to echo one another. Being accosted byesperate, homeless woman and discussing it with friends. Watching Reds. Reading about socialism and current politics and how this is echoed in the Up Series. Talking with LT about the homeless in NOLA.) Anyways, here is some passages:

“[Charles’s/Karl’s] own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heave had always worried him because it was so boring – there was nothing to do – and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?

He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ (174).

Just a couple pages earlier, Charles/Karl said to his tutor, “What I can’t see – what I really can’t see – is why everyone doesn’t ask themselves that, all the time [why are the poor poor?]. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for everyone to see – and get told what the Bible says about the poor – and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats – and eating huge beefsteaks – I can’t see it” (170). Charles/Karl is rejecting the life of his banker father who is manipulating the poor and Africans through the gold trade. Charles’s/Karl’s rebellion comes through his involvement in the anarchist movement. He eventually meets Emma Goldman in Paris, etc. I haven’t quite got to a part where we will see where he ends up, but his is one of the more interesting threads of the novel because of the fact that it seems so much like a surplus for the other narratives. In many ways, his story is there for comparative reasons. But maybe it is the story we are supposed to learn so much more from. Not sure? However, maybe I should reveal some of my stupidity. Um, I had totally never though of Heaven as Utopia. Okay. Yeah, a little crazy. But I just didn’t think of it in that terminology before. And when Byatt writes about his essay and the discussion of Heaven – I was so piqued. I also find myself a little reactionary to the passage because I know so many people that I are trying to live “off the grid,” and I’ve seen so many things documentaries about these types of people (another echo – Into the Wild, Grizzly Man).

What I think is so interesting is that Charles/Karl discusses something that I have issue with in this whole agrarian throwback movement and its nostalgic overtones. By ignoring progress and the current world and reverting back to medieval, pre-Industrial life, is that really solving anything? Certainly you might escape the ills of contemporary society, but isn’t it naïve to think that you are really escaping anything. I mean these societies, communes, trailers, houses, farms are just as utopic (? Utopia-like) as Shaker communities, Edward Carpenter’s pastoral visions, or Lawrence’s Rananim. And yet, I feel that I have no real right to bitch about some of this stuff because it is not like I am living in this type of community nor am I walking the street trying to save lives. I certainly talk the talk of activism and civil liberties and working for gender equality, etc., but when it comes to walking the walk, I think my lungs are still expanding. I take a couple steps on the path but never really get too far. Am I thus guilty because I am okay with my own bourgeois status?

Right, maybe, I don’t know? It is extremely unclear to me where Byatt stands on this issue, but her characters run the gamut of positions. Whereas Charles/Karl reacts to violently against this, it is clear that one of this foils, Tom, needs this type of ignorance to avoid the pain of society – although his pain is more social and not classed or technologically related. I think in the context of the book I am poised in the middle of her discourse concerning this topic so I am interested to see where this thread continues. As of now, Charles/Karl has just met Emma Goldman and some more Russian and German anarchists in Paris. Now that he is back in England, I don’t know what he will become or use this experience, but I can’t wait to find out.

Byatt, A. S. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009.

TV Show of the Month: Upstairs, Downstairs

For my British-Irish Modernism class, I have to create an annotated bibliography for the historical contexts of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. I came across this really interesting article by Carl Freedman, about the connection between the Merchant Ivory production and a 1970s TV show called, Upstairs, Downstairs. Thus, in the course of research and in honor of feeding my habit, I decided to put the first season on my Netflix, and I finished it just now. While the show covers quite a long time period, the first season focuses on 1903-1909, which works really well with researching the Edwardian period. The show actually starts the same year that Queen Victoria died and features an episode in October 1908, which is the same month that A Room with a View was published. [This episode was a little lame, "The Swedish Tiger." It didn't really fit into recreating history the way a number of the other episodes have.]

This TV version of Altman's Gosford Park has a number of interesting plot lines and twists that makes Altman's attempt to capture the intrigues of early twentieth-century British life as a feeble attempt at best. While their plots are not the same, the documentation of classed and gendered life in Upstairs, Downstairs is amazing! I would say the stand out episodes from the first season would be the first one, "On Trial," episode two, "The Mistress and the Maids," and episode eight, "I Dies from Love." The show does a great job of showing what life for the upper and lowers classes was like and how gender relations were conducted between the classes. Of course, you see the men cheating on women, the servants fighting and dying for the chances of love, and surprisingly, the mother, Mistress Belamy, having her own affair.

This video is from the episode where the maid, Sarah, and the Mistress Marjorie Bellamy are both being painted by this artist only for their paintings to be displayed in public, which goes on to create quite a scandal in the Royal Academy.

Along with the really interesting episodes/writing, the show has some first-class acting. The show went one to win BAFTA and Emmy awards. One of the anchors of the show is Jean Marsh, who plays the main housemaid, Rose, and in fact she helped to create the show with fellow actor, Eileen Atkins. [You might recognize Marsh as Mombi from Return to OZ or Queen Bavmorda from Willow.] I would also note that Pauline Collins, who plays Sarah, is another very interesting actress whose role on the show is great. I've never laughed so hard in my life.

Anyways, I just thought I would share this rather interesting "Bits and Bobs" (as one of my favorite EW blogger says) from Britain would be something cool to share.

Movie of the Month: Revolutionary Road

Please let this be fair warning, but if you didn't see Revolutionary Road, you may not want to read the rest of this blog entry. There is a part of me that does not want to share any of this information with someone who hasn't seen the film and there is this other part of me that feels like I need to be like a newsie on the street corner begging people to see this film. Needless to say, if you haven't seen this great movie yet, you need to. In fact, you need to go as soon as possible because I don't know how much longer it will be at the theatres, and you should see it before the Oscars so that you might have a good vantage in judging it in comparison to other films. Also, as just a side note, I think I might start this new "Movie of the Month" entry post. So, Revolutionary Road will be my selection for the month of January, consider this post two days late.

The films stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, two people disillusioned and maybe reillusioned by 1950s American culture. Plot-wise, the film follows Frank to his city job where he feels like nothing but a machine in a cog, while April remains at home in the suburbs as nothing more than a copy of those around her. Both are jaded by their intellectual understanding of what it means to fit in. One of the lines in the movie suggests that once thought they were above it all, but as April soon realizes, they are not above anything--that they are nothing but copies/machines, things that they hated before moving to suburbia. Of course, the film contains a number of other sub characters, but perhaps the one worth mentioning would be Frank and April's realtor's son, a former mathematics PhD who has been previously committed in a mental home/insane asylum. While seemingly "abnormal," this character, whose names escapes me, acts as the Shakespearean "fool" who contains all of the knowledge, who attempts to inform the Wheelers of the full impact of their decisions, and in fact, seems to be the only one that can understand them and their lives.

Non-plot wise, what I found interesting was the film's indictment/assessment/evaluation of American suburbia. I was able to do a minimal bit of research about the film and the book in which the film is based off of. The film seems to take on not only problems about life outside of the city, but also issues of gender, sanity, economics, sexuality, and parenthood. What does it mean to have children? What causes someone to fall out of love? How much danger is involved in having an abortion? Why do men's desires take precedence over women's in relationships? All interesting questions. All questions tackled with in the film.

Now, the little bit about the film that I truly want to talk about is the ending, which, of course, I know have to give a spoiler warning about. [So don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.] The "climax" of the film seems to be when April gives herself an abortion, post-12 weeks, which the film has repeatedly claimed is dangerous to do after 12 weeks. When April does give herself an abortion, she walks downstairs and stands in the open window way--what we see is Revolutionary Road, we see the street they live on, the world they inhabit. She stands there as if claiming, "Look at what you have done to me. Look what you made me do." As she remains there, the camera shows blood spots on her dress and a pool of blood forming below her. As the point, the viewer sort of realizes that things aren't going all that well. She runs to the phone, calls for help....next thing, Frank is in the hospital telling his neighbor that she waited to long to get to the hospital. I think this is the crux of the film, and for me, something I really want to debate with people. Is she just giving herself an abortion because that is what she wants to do, or is she committing suicide? There are so many signs that suggest the latter. Perhaps that was the only way out of escaping suburbia.

For me the scene echoed a number of instances in Byatt's Babel Tower when Daniel gets calls at the hotline from mothers who abandoned their children, wandering about England and wondering if it was the right thing to do. They were so illusioned as to what life was supposed to be like, what women's roles where supposed to be. This film just made me think about this more and more. Is the only way to escape something is complete abandonment? But it also made me re-evaluate my own desires and my own wants/needs. This is a question that I have continually asked myself, again and again, and I am sure it is a question that I will continue to grapple with more and more in the coming years as I mature into adulthood.

Go out and see Revolutionary Road. Hopefully you will think it is a great film! And if you enjoy it, hopefully you also cried because of how sad it was.

Banning Bullying

Why is New York such a cool state? Answer: Because its Republican State Senators introduced a bill into their state legislature attempting to ban bullying in public schools. Key element to the bill: gay, lesbian, and transgender students would be protected under the bill because it will protect students and teachers of all sexual orientations and genders. Awesome.


Alan Van Capelle, the director of a pro-gay New York agency, said, “In a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy [and] Will and Grace world, kids are coming out at a much younger age,” he said. “As a community, we have done a woefully inadequate job of protecting them.”

I totally think that this is awesome that New York is doing this, and I hope that soon many others states will catch on. To me, this says that there are parts of America were progress and education have reached the minds of individuals. However, as per course, there are some issues with the bill. It won't be voted on at today's session, but hopefully, they will vote on it in the near future.

I personally remember a kid/possible friend/acquaintance from high school who was treated horribly at school because of his orientation. The worst of it was during P.E. one day when some other students threw rocks at him, which was just absolutely horrible and explains why I took extra-credit courses outside of school to make up for my in school P.E. credit. Maybe someday this won't happen to children. Maybe one day societ will be able to realize that we are all just people and that treating others with such disdain for no reason is not necessary.

For more about this legislation see the article in NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/education/08bully.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin