I love Gus van Sant, but I don’t think I’ve ever loved or been as impressed by any of his films as much as MILK, about assassinated gay activist Harvey Milk. It didn’t hurt that Sean Penn gives one of his most understated and brilliant performances of a career full of great performances. Or that Batboy nemesis James Franco has finally got himself a good role to exploit those talents (and those baby-boy good looks) of his. This is a film full of emotional resonance—for Milk as much as for the cause—and the depiction of the times is about as good as it gets. If there was a single wrong note, I couldn’t spot it. I came out the year Milk was assassinated and still remember the impact of his murder as well as the outrage and the surge of activist fervour that followed. It’s tellingly sad that Harvey Milk helped defeat Proposition 6 in 1978 (a bill that would have denied jobs to gay and lesbian teachers in California) and 30 years later the film opens with the success of Proposition 8, which denies the right for same sex marriage in the very same state. Have we gone that far backwards?
November 5, 2008
For once, that slumbering giant to the south got it right. Has an American president (elect) ever reached out, not only to ‘black and white, Asian and Hispanic, young and old, straight and gay, abled and disabled’, but also to the ‘darkest corners of the earth’? Extraordinary! It was as though the spiritual child of John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi just took office. It was a great speech given by a great orator. Gone were the meaningless old platitudes of ‘my fellow Americans’ and ‘the greatest country on earth.’ What replaced it was truth and sincerity. Even to a skeptic like me, it was a revelation, and a humbling one. Has greatness been thrust upon us?
November 2, 2008
Whoever said writing isn’t a practical profession? I’m amazed by the useful things I learn researching my stories. For instance, in the last few weeks I’ve come across three yards with aconite growing within reach of the street.
Don’t know what aconite is? It’s a deadly poison, also known as monkshood. All parts of this plant are lethal, and if you pick it with a cut on your hand, you might die. If you ate even a tiny piece of it, you definitely would. A year ago I wouldn’t have known what it looked like, but I do after having written my literary thriller, LAKE ON THE MOUNTAIN.
Once you know what they look like, the (usually) deep blue flowers are easy to spot because they resemble miniature bishop’s caps or those peaked hoods medieval monks wore. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Aconitum_variegatum_110807f.jpg) Some of the more virulent varieties are blooming now and will keep doing so until the frost kills them.
We know not to eat mushrooms in the wild, but few of us would hesitate to pick flowers. When I point it out, most people are shocked to learn what they have growing in places accessible to both children and pets (not to mention unwary gardeners!)
October 26, 2008
Since returning from France I’ve been working sporadically on a new novel, IN THE PLACE OF JOY AND LAUGHTER. Yesterday it finally started to open up for me, revealing more and more of what the characters are about.
Sometimes I write with a game plan and a fully conceived plotline in my head, while at other times I simply go with my intuition. This is one of the latter, and the going has been slow. I don’t feel I am suddenly about to start zipping along, but now I have a much better sense of where things are heading.
Part of the difficulty is that there are three concurrent timelines and three separate characters who don’t fully link till later in the book. It’s been a challenge keeping the book feeling like a whole entity rather than a series of aimless wanderings.
October 15, 2008
Apart from being in Paris, two moments stand out from my recent trip to France. By chance we stumbled on the highway along the Normandy coast where the D-Day invasions took place. Omaha Beach, at Saint-Laurent-Sur-Mer, was one of the prime locations for the Allied landings under Churchill and Eisenhower. If it had been in North America, Disney and McDonalds would have set in, Yuppies would have gentrified and over-built the area. Here, a single monument and a statue suffice to commemorate the scarcely imaginable battle that took place there on June 6, 1944. Apart from sand and sea, there is little else than silence stretching along the shore.
Heading back through the Loire Valley we stopped at Illiers-Combray, famous for having served as the setting for parts of Proust’s monumental À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. It’s a small, unimposing village, whose church, memorialized in the same book, is much smaller and far less spectacular than Proust’s rendering—not a surprise. Still, the village has an otherworldly charm, especially by twilight, despite its total lack of pretension or even any seeming interest in the tourist trade.
October 10, 2008
As always, Paris is a whirlwind of sights and sounds, grandeur and beauty.
While Prague and Budapest can compete with it for majesty, no other city can compare for the richness of its cultural history. Paris was where the 20th century was, that eccentric raconteur of concision Gertrude Stein declared. As usual, she got it right.
Where else can you say Proust and Joyce shared a cab at that corner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank in that bar, while over there Charles De Gaulle gave his historic speech on the liberation of Paris from the Nazis?
Where else can you spend an afternoon visiting the graves of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, and then pop over to visit 19th century near-neighbours Frederic Chopin and the unjustly neglected Luigi Cherubini (whom Beethoven declared the greatest living composer)?
That’s my Paris. And so much more.
October 2, 2008
In between filling out those all-important grant applications (Writers' Reserve, etc.) and getting ready to leave for Paris, I've been working on my latest novel, In The Place of Joy and Laughter, a fairly serious literary work about life, death and dancing. (One of the characters is a choreographer.) It seems I've been spoiled by thriller writing, because suddenly I've been reduced from averaging 2500 words a day to something more like 250, if that. I forgot how slow going writing can be at times, though the trade-off is finding this book is producing some of the best prose I've ever written.
