1. While I walked "The Trail" to the high school and then returned home via Jacobs Gulch Road and Cameron Ave., I listened to a fascinating episode of the podcast, Snap Judgment. It featured Barry Rosen, the US Embassy's press attache in Tehran in 1979. He was held in captivity as a hostage for 444 days when Iranian students breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy and took control of it.
In the Snap Judgment episode entitled "Field of Dreams", Barry Rosen, now in his mid to late 70s, quietly describes what he experienced as a hostage and how his memories of baseball, especially of going to games as a young boy at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to watch the Dodgers, helped him endure the darkness, isolation, and despair of his ordeal.
Want to listen to Barry Rosen tell his story of being a hostage and hear him reflect on the baseball's positive impact on his life in captivity and in the years that have followed? Just click here.
2. Today was Zoom day for the Westminster Basement Study Group and Bill, Diane, Val, and I gathered via the magic of the Zoom app and the World Wide Web for an excellent conversation. We shared our perspectives on recent news stories, especially the Justice Alito draft opinion on Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization. We listened to Bill talk about not being able to play guitar and his decision to do a weekly poetry reading online instead of playing his songs each week. We Basementeers regularly discuss, without pity, how we are experiencing growing old and this most significant change in Bill's life fits squarely in that conversation.
In our time online and in some FB conversation later in the day, we nailed down our plans to meet at Bridgit's in Chehalis on Saturday the 28th for early afternoon snacks and in person conversation. We rarely see each other in person so this get together promises to be deeply satisfying.
3. Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and was the lead actor in the independent movie, Wanda. It first appeared in film festivals and in limited movie theaters in 1970.
Today, during our Zoom meeting, Bill talked about how most of the poetry he's been reading lately has been written by women and we discussed the value of seeing the world from women's perspectives. Our discussion reminded me of a Greyhound bus ride I took from Seattle to Spokane at the end of spring break in 1983. I read most, if not all, of Adrienne Rich's collection of essays, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Before reading this book, I accepted, without question, that all of us, men and women, are alike in at the level of our shared human nature. Rich bluntly and forcefully challenged this idea and confronted me, for the first time, with the idea -- the fact? -- that women experience the world differently, see the world differently, and are not, at the deepest ontological level, at the level of being, the same as men.
So, to me, in essence, I heard Bill saying today that when he reads the poetry Mary Oliver or Adrienne Rich or Eileen Myles or Ruth Stone, he's learning about ways of engaging the world that are outside of his own experience BUT that the poems invite him into, invite him to be open to, invite him to experience and possibly even understand the world in ways different from his limited perspective.
All of this was on my mind as I watched Wanda, on the Criterion Channel this evening (it's also available on HBO Max and for rent or purchase on iTunes -- and, possibly elsewhere).
I don't want to give away what happens in this movie.
I will, however, say a few things about it.
First, of all, I often hear people I know say that they don't enjoy a movie if they find the characters in it unlikeable. I don't think Barbara Loden wrote and directed Wanda with the purpose of inviting us to like Wanda. Nor to pity her. I would say she invites us to experience Wanda's displacement, isolation, and existential distress.
Second of all, when this movie came out, some women who reviewed it were critical of it because Barbara Loden does not develop the character Wanda as a woman for other women to model themselves after. In later years, other women commenting on the movie saw this portrayal of Wanda as a strength of the movie, saw the raw portrayal of Wanda as potently unforgettable.
Lastly, Wanda is not an uplifting movie and never pretends to be. If uplifting escapist movies take us away from the harshness of the world, Wanda is the opposite of escapist. In this movie, we move more fully into the world's harshness.
I can't imagine anyone answering the question, "Did you like Wanda?".
It's not a movie to like or dislike.
It's a movie that rejects slick production values, minimizes the importance of plot, is presented to us in a nearly documentary style (cinema verite), and opens up for us ways that movies can be powerful without aiming to entertain us or, in any way, comfort us.
Wanda sat on my list of movies to see for a long time. Tonight was the right time for me to view it. My guess is that I'll return to it again.
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