G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written January 2, 2009

Merry Christmas, fellow travelers, and best wishes for your new year. Getting resolutions ready?

I look back at my 2008 ones with a mix of pride and dismay. I did get the dining room floor refinished. I did make a couple of new friends I could ask to the movies, but not the five I'd aimed for. I didn't lose much weight. I did find a publisher for a book I'd written, though the publication date seems to get further and further away. I didn't go through with the idea of seeking grant money to publish a luxurious volume of stories selected from back issues of Twister, the irregular magazine of genre fiction set in Manhattan, Kansas that I somehow inherited--pulp stuff shouldn't, I decided, be published on velum.

I have been submitting a detective story novel to agents, so far without much luck. I didn't write and submit a dozen new poems, mostly because I didn't have any ideas for poems. I did begin re-printing some old t-shirts, including the old Underground map re-made for Aggieville. But I didn't get several made I'd wanted to--the powercat with the hair from the cover of Dylan's Greatest Hits, the old Susan Warden Dancers shirt, or one with my family motto: "Perdite certamen; at spiritus retinendus est" ("Lose the game; win the party").

I am taking Johnny and Cheryl off to London for a week, in part to do research for a possible 2010 theater season group tour. Interested? I did replace the dining room chandelier. I didn't paint downstairs. I did write and record proof-version of five songs, just barely.

And I read seventy-nine books (and some others I reviewed, and about forty issues of literary magazines). Not bad. Not a record. And I may have gone a little soft on myself, reading pleasant crud too often and significant stuff too slowly.

Over the last couple of weeks, I read or tried to read four books. Or in one case I tried to listen to one. Dick Francis, bless his ancient heart, has a new horsy detective story out, co-written by his son Felix. I got the public library's copy of Silks to play during our drives into south Kansas at Christmas. But we couldn't listen to it. The book seemed to me whiny, and too often the villain and the hero were doing things to keep the plot alive, not to advance their independent ends. The title refers both to the uniforms jockeys wear, but also to the status of "Queen's Counsel," given to accomplished barristers who are then allowed to plead cases for the crown. Our hero is a lawyer and an amateur jockey who is being told to lose the murder case of a champion pro horse race rider.

I didn't have much fun reading the sketches that make up Reginald and Reginald in Russia, by Saki (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/saki). This is the early twentieth century Brit who wrote "The Open Window." I couldn't read his The Unbearable Bassington when I tried to read that a couple of years ago. But that was a book with a wonderful dust jacket. I tried to read about Reginald in a 1937 Viking Press volume, The Complete Short Stories of Saki, which includes "Biography of Saki," by E.M. Munro. H.H. Munro is Saki's real name.

Every night for a hundred nights I'd read one style sample taken from the work of a famous writer--each sample somehow about style--and commentary by Louis T. Milic in his Stylists on Style. So I'd read about a page of C.S. Lewis and then a page or so of commentary, including references to specific phrases and idioms. And then the next night it would be Cyril Connolly. And so on.

     The length of Milton's sentences is proverbial and it possibly contributes to the difficulty they give the reader. But it is not the length but the grammatical complexity--frequency and depth of embedding of inserted constructions--which is perceived by the reader as difficulty. Compare the linear additive syntax of SWIFT (No. 36, note 3).
     8. latelier. More recently.

This sort of thing makes a writer more aware of his style. And it is sometimes interesting to read. But Milic isn't always right about writers, or so I decided again and again.

I bought a Folio Society (http://www.foliosociety.com/) book called Crime Stories from the Strand at the Dusty Bookshelf in Aggieville a few years ago. Geraldine Beare had selected them from the old pre-t.v. general audience magazine. Included were some famous ones--Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. And there were good stories by recognizable names including E.C. Bentley, Edgar Walace, Carter Dickinson, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and good old H.C. Bailey. Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes anthologies contain better and more representative stories. But this collection was amusing.

I didn't see a single live performance (church services excepted) the last two weeks. But we've been awash in movies, most of them modestly interesting.

Yes Man pairs a relatively restrained Jim Carey with Zooey Deschannel (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0221046/ ). He has been told to embrace life by taking up all offers, and this doesn't always work out for him. Passable stuff. At one point the couple agrees to take the first flight that comes into LAX and ends up spending a football Saturday in Lincoln, Nebraska where they get tickets to a game and are detained by Homeland Security.

The new Will Smith film, Seven Pounds, is another one of those he has to drag us through. No other contemporary actor could be amusing enough in this sort of artificial self-sacrifice to get anybody to watch the whole movie. Guilt ridden over the death of his wife, he is going to kill himself and give away his assets, including his organs, to the worthy. I did like looking at the printing presses. Otherwise this was a waste of time. And of Smith's rep.

The Adventures of Despereaux (http://www.candlewick.com/despereaux/), on the other hand, is a lot of fun to watch. Based on a children's book, it follows a chivalrous mouse on a fairytale mission to revitalize a kingdom dependent on soup for its weather. I don't usually like animateds all that much. This one was superior.

Bedtime Stories was not so much an Adam Sandler movie (coarse, wild characters, eighties music) as a formulaic Disney one (child characters, cute pets, romances for all in the story's resolution). A.S. plays a hotel handyman who must come up with an idea for a new hotel's "theme" if he is to be named manager. He doesn't come up with one, by the way.

What the heck was Fincher (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000399/ ) doing making a three hour Brad Pitt movie inspired vaguely by Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? This isn't really a bad movie. But it isn't really a good one, either. Pitt's character is born an old man who gets younger as time goes by. With poor Cate Blanchett.

Also about time and aging is Marley & Me, based on a book based on newspaper columns about John Grogan's experiences with his dog. Except that the movie isn't much about the dog. Heck, we hardly learn anything about the dog. So we may be annoyed when the movie spends its last half hour trying to get us to cry over the dog's death.

I was less unhappy with Valkyrie, about von Steppenberg's attempt to blow Hitler up. With Branagh, Stamp, Wilkinson, MacNeice, Izzard, and Nighy, this has got plenty of acting in it. The story, which wants to make German officers who want to sue the allies for peace into moral heroes, can be tense occasionally. Tom Cruise is, as always, Tom Cruise.

But in Doubt, Amy Adams and Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep aren't who they were in their last films. Along with Viola Davis, they turn in award worthy performances in a sort of Oleanna-lite, a terrific adaptation of a stageplay about nuns, in the 1960s, worried about what may be a pedophile priest. In this year of mediocre and few serious films, Doubt may win some Oscars.

I also saw the comic book super-hero movie send-up, The Spirit, which doesn't establish that it is making fun of the genre. Maybe one can't inflate a tone more fully than the films that are serious about giving us Spiderman or Ironman are already doing. Whatever.

At my father-in-law's I saw a couple of movies he owned on D.V.D.  One was Jumpers, the sci fi and adventure film about guys who can telepathically transport themselves to any setting they've seen. That I didn't like much more than I did when I saw it in a theater. But I hadn't ever seen About Schmidt, a 2002 comedy about a retired Omaha insurance actuary, a character played by Nicholson. Some funny moments here, and some earned regret.

One of my 2009 resolutions is going to be to live without Hollywood-associated regrets.  I'll be back here in two weeks to tell you if I was entertained by West End plays. I have some likely decent ones scheduled, including a Twefth Night with Derek Jacobi (http://www.sparrowsp.addr.com/sdjmain.htm ).