A lot to do about....

Once long ago, I was full of myself and had something to say about many things. Now I just come up empty. Getting old saddens me. Worse is whining and complaining about it. I heard an inspirational tape a few years back about the accomplishments of all these people in their 50's or mostly beyond. I need to hear it again.

Detachment

"Detachment" is the new film starring Adrian Brody, who is becoming large in my eyes for his keen acting ability. His own eyes reflect the detachment of the title and the great sorrow detachment brings. He is not part of us; he belongs elsewhere, but while he's here, let's cling fiercely to him for all he's worth or let's ignore him totally.This is the view of his students, the substitute who has come to these modern existentialists, those who are also detached. Those not are ignored in this film.

Brody plays a permanent substitute teacher who moves from school to school, filling in for first one teacher then the next. His job mirrors his commitment-less life. One point he makes is that we all have secrets. His is seeing his pitiful mother naked and dead as a young boy. It's a story etched in his face and blast through his eyes. It helps him present depressing literature to a class full of pained and hurting teenagers. They sense his depths of pain and want to commit to him, drain his life, pulse it into their own veins of emptiness and loneliness and despair.

A female colleague tells Brody's character that she is afraid of going home. Her soul is also devoid of emotion--it's just hollowness. She's Eliot's hollow man. She is all right in the classroom where she is engaged and engaging, yet all those hours alone at home are just too frightening to consider.

Lucy Liu plays the counselor who abhors counseling because of the horror she encounters in these teens' abysmal lives. Finally, she tells one girl who has a dwarfish soul to get "the f.... out of her office." It's a powerful scene of one educator completely coming unglued and letting the knives out of the drawer.

One iota of joy concludes this celluloidic adventure: the prostitute teen whom Brody's character befriends, well, the film is worth this last scene, this little iota of joy or something like joy.

The film is presented much like a documentary on the  barren life of a teacher and the teens in his/her arena. There is much about the film that rings so true (spoken by a teacher of 40 years), and perhaps much that is exaggerated. The director pushes a heavy hand to draw attention to the utter despair that is our modern times in far too many lives.

Jack Reacher: A Tribute

Why is Stephen King so popular? Because he can put words on paper that mesmerize  readers into scooping up those words as fast as they can to follow the story. "It's the story," one might say, like "it's the economy."

Lee Child writes like that, although the style is totally different. Just how fast can I read a Reacher novel? First who's Reacher? Jack Reacher is Child's main character through his series of novels about the military police officer (even his mother calls him Reacher). Like King, Child writes mesmerizing stories. Once I start a Reacher novel, reading it is all I want to do and must be intentional in order to do other things. My mother is my reading partner and says she reads so fast just "to see what happens" and often returns to read the book a second time to pick up those details she missed during the first reading. Therefore that whole series of novels is good for two rounds.

King writes with flair, with talent and skill. He could have written one of the Great American Novels (and perhaps he did). However, Lee Child has no such skill--and that's not a bad thing. He writes short, choppy sentences (like Hemingway), but they match  his main character, Jack Reacher, a military cop, who retires at one point to become basically a drifter/hero on a quest, who rights wrongs. He doesn't need to tilt at windmills because he is too big and strong, but he certainly does not fear any opponent who comes up against him. At six feet five inches and 240 pounds, he is a brute that others (with any sense) come to fear.

I'm nearing the end of my journey with the Reacher novel I found in a republished format. It's "The Enemy" (a multi-purpose title that encompasses so many different enemies, both physical and psychological.) There's not much I can say in reviewing the novel without giving away really important pieces of plot, so I'll just focus on the female character. Nearly always, Reacher has a companion in the novel who works with him in solving the crime. This time it is another military police officer who wants to work in the division Reacher is in. They are opposites except in brain power and the ability to think globally. He is white and big; she is black and petite. (She is my favorite female character in the Reacher series.) They make a formidable partnership.

This Reacher novel made me shed tears at the end. I'll leave it at that. An excellent entry in the series.

A Cat in Paris

A Cat in Paris

(The following is taken from Amazon. Click on the link above for more information.)

"The Academy Award-nominated A CAT IN PARIS is a beautifully hand-drawn caper set in the shadow-drenched alleyways of Paris. Dino is a cat that leads a double life. By day he lives with Zoe, a little girl whose mother is a detective in the Parisian police force. But at night Dino sneaks out the window to work with Nico a slinky cat burglar with a big heart, whose fluid movements are poetry in motion as he evades captors and slips and swishes from rooftop to rooftop across the Paris skyline. A CAT IN PARIS is a delightful animated adventure perfect for both adults and children a witty and stylish "animated noir" with a jazzy soundtrack featuring Billie Holiday and a thrilling climax on top of Notre Dame cathedral.
Featuring the voices of Academy Award winner Marcia Gay Harden (Mystic River), Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket)."

My note: I showed this movie to my French classes, eons removed from the lives and location of the characters in the animated film. They loved it and actually wanted me to show it twice (no time). I also loved it. My point? "A Cat in Paris" is a universal film, to be enjoyed by a multitude of viewers.

A love story

This is my love story, a really unusual love story. It's not about a man and a woman, or any usual relationship. It's about a teacher, an aging teacher, retired for 10 years, who went to teach at an "inner city" school. To teach French there.

I needed the money and could not find a job teaching English or working as a librarian, two of my areas of certification. School started and I still did not have a job. I had been looking at this French position at this "inner city" school, but was really hesitant to interview. One, I am not that fluent in French. I can read and write it and speak hesitantly, so I was not eager to do something I did not excel in. Two, I did not know how I would do in a school that was 99.8% another race. How would they accept me? That was my biggest worry. As it turned out, that worry was quite grounded.

Students were absolutely horrible to me--disrespectful, rude, they minimized me every way they could. The disciplinarian tried to work with me. He told me I had to earn their trust. So that's what I did. I worked more on relationships. French came along--it, after all, was the structure of our relationship.

Perhaps it was the hard work, but eventually, I came to absolutely love those students. Nearly every one of them. I learned so much from them. Most of them came to love me, too. But not all. That's to be expected.

There's so much left to say, but I'm leaving it unsaid. The bottom line is what a remarkable year I had, what a great experience it was, and how much I would like to do it again.

Reading material

I's time to examine my reading material. It leaves me undernourished, brain-depleted, contemptuous of my own reading habits. All I read is the various thrillers--the more exciting, the better. But what food for thought, for provocation comes from those? Oh, yes, the Alex Cross novel about Alex going to Africa in pursuit of a criminal really wasn't that believable, yet Patterson could --and did--include meaty information about African teens,  orphaned and brainwashed boys, their access to power and what it might mean to them. Oh, the horror, the horror. This particular assassin, their controller, used them in his kills. So, I learned about killers and a horrible type of killing. Not believable? Wrong, it's true--hmmmm.

In another thriller, I learned about the horrors in current Russia--and what nightmares they bring! Again, killing and more killing.

Ask me about a a provocative book, one that instigates, invigorates, and is worthy of time spent in its envelopment. Quick, name one! "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee. I've read that one twice and seen the movie twice. What instigation, what provocation! A professor seduces one of his students and continues to trick her into sex until she cracks. He is released from his job and seeks out his distant daughter who lives out in the veldt, where she grows flowers to sell and makes a quiet life. During his stay she is raped under questionable circumstances and the professor is brutalized. Both survive but are equally affected and changed by their experiences. She quietly compromises herself to accept her pregnancy and what it means in her surroundings (intentionally left vague here by me), whereas the professor wants to fight. Finally, he returns to the city to find his former student, only to be rejected and humiliated by the family. He returns to his own daughter and accepts the inevitability of her decision. He has no choice because he has nowhere else he can go. Now he is compromised.

What's the disgrace? Obviously, his fall from grace as a respectable professor, his tainted seduction of the girl lead to his disgrace. But more is going on. The daughter is disgraced by her rape. The professor is disgraced by his inability to protect her or himself. It goes on, more disgrace, leading to final decisions and acceptance of what is rather than what could be, although that concept is also part of the story. This novel is not entertaining or thrilling (like my crime or spy books), but it shows human nature in tumult, in despair, in disgrace, and then choices. I will read this book again for its beauty of language and for a story of human dignity.

The following is the last paragraph in William Faulkner's acceptance speech for the Noble Prize in Literature. I don't think anyone has ever said it better about the role of the writer.
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

In "Disgrace," the professor returns to his daughter, I think, because of her "courage and honor and hope..."--all of which compensate for the disgrace of the rape and his own fall from grace. They both will "endure and prevail." "Disgrace" is one of those great novels that a well-read person should know.