1. For about a year, in Eugene, before moving back east, I lived within easy walking distance of a new downtown movie theater, now called the Broadway Metro. When the theater first opened, in May 2013, it screened matinees on week days as well as weekends. I went to several week day matinee screenings. I loved it. It's my favorite time to be in a movie theater. If I could change one thing about Kellogg, this would be it. I'd ask the genie in the bottle to give us a movie theater that showed independent movies in the afternoon (and the evening).
I bring this up because of one of my sweetest memories of watching movies at the Broadway Metro. This morning (I couldn't wait for a matinee), I watched 20 Feet from Stardom, the documentary that tells the story of backup singers in popular music. It's informative, moving, heartbreaking, inspiring, and invigorating. I had let nearly seven years pass since I first saw it in July of 2013 and seeing it again today was almost like seeing it afresh. I won't let another seven years pass before I watch it again.
2. It was a good day for books coming into my world. When today's mail arrived, I got a package from Better World Books. I purchased a used and marked up Penguin edition of Bleak House because I wanted to read the introduction written by J. Hillis Miller, hoping that I was still capable of reading erudite literary analysis (or criticism). I read it. I understood much of it, but not well enough to summarize it intelligently and I've begun to reread it. I can say that what appeals to me about Miller's perspective is that he observes a fundamental instability in the way Dickens wrote Bleak House (two narrators, for example, among other elements). The internal instabilities of the novel, in Miller's view, reflect Dickens' unease with and view of instability in the mid-nineteenth century institutions and day to day life of London and England.
I picked up two books that arrived at the library: William Stafford's volume of selected poems, The Darkness Around Us Is Deep and Jack Gilbert's book of poems, Refusing Heaven. I look forward to reading these books and writing a bit about some of the poems in future days and weeks.
3. As it comes to us who subscribe to BritBox, the 2005 BBC version of Bleak House is presented in eight episodes, each lasting about an hour. I watched the first four episodes late this afternoon and on into the evening. I kept thinking what a daunting project it must have been to pare down this sprawling novel and its huge cast of characters into a mini-series.
This production takes on the complexity of the plot of Bleak House by deftly cutting back and forth between characters and story lines, laying the groundwork for when these apparently unrelated characters and plots begin to intertwine. I have enjoyed how the telling of this story seems to begin at the edges and slowly and inevitably grows more focused with a sense of events closing in on characters like, say, Lady Dedlock and Richard Carstone. I'm enjoying the depiction of all the characters. Charles Dance as the soulless and predatory Mr. Tulkinghorn and Gillian Anderson as the haunted and brittle Lady Dedlock stand out for me, but not as superior to the rest of the cast. Across the board, I experience them all as brilliant.
Here is Stu's limerick:
It seems many right now are so mad.
Spurred on by events that were bad.
Can’t undo past mistakes,
Or change who got the breaks.
Wish instead of black and white we saw plaid.
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