You keep saying you've got something for me... something you call love, but confess.... Sal from Seafood is at it again. To the utter astonishment of weekday shoppers navigating the ever-narrowing and always harrowing aisles at Our Local Grocery Store-- and to the great chagrin of the establishment's assortment of Generation X, Y, and Z employees-- the disgruntled fishmonger takes a break from filleting flounder and icing tilapia one fine morning in June, skulking into the manager's office and sidling up to the store's sound system. Down, down, down he twists the music dial, and back, back, back we travel along the timeline of American popular music. New Millennium Madness? No more. Before we can sniff and squeeze and shake a cantaloupe, we find ourselves in The Naughty Nineties:
Tonight, Tonight: One of Our Favorite Music Videos
But only for a moment. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief when Sal moves on from The Naughty Nineties and The Smashing Pumpkins Retrospective: the produce department is in absolute disarray after the musically-inspired ritualistic mashing of melons and squishing of squash.
Next up? The Existential Eighties: I Want to Know What Love Is, and I want you to tell me using Foreigner's power-ballad format. Then... static, followed by The Sexually Suggestive Seventies. The uncomfortably close harmony of Starland Vocal Band's Afternoon Delight stalks us as we browse the celery and completely sublimates our frozen food section experience.
Random House, 2010. 358 pages.
Fiction Favorites
Don't touch that dial. By the time we gather on NWC's flower-fringed patio on that June afternoon, Nancy Sinatra's iconic boots have exited the grocery store and are go-go-going in our collective unconscious. We are musically exhausted and nutritionally famished. We sip various refreshing beverages, including invigorating green iced tea. We sample savory cheeses and tempting little crackers. And then, at long last, we engage in lively conversation about the current book selection: a thoroughly enjoyable debut novel set in a smallish English village, featuring honor-bound-stiff-upper-lip-and-all-that widower Major Ernest Pettigrew, dignified widow Mrs. Jasmina Ali, and a big family brouhaha regarding the proper dispensation of a pair of heirloom hunting rifles. The late-in-life courtship antics of the major and the Pakistani shopkeeper raise a few eyebrows and raise several discussion points about culture-clashing in contemporary society and country life in Merry Old England. Would it surprise us if a round of penultimate gun play punctuated this wise and witty comedy of manners? My dear ladies, why on earth not?
Persephone Books, 2008. 233 pages.
British Invasion, Oldies But Goodies
British Invasion, Oldies But Goodies
The Pettigrew in question here is no relation to the above-mentioned Major, but her story is equally charming. This one details twenty-four hours of shenanigans and screwball activity that transform the life of poor, prim, and socially neglected Miss Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle-aged governess who averts an employment crisis by going to work for an alluring American actress and nightclub singer. Delysia LaFosse is her name: she moves in glamorous, madcap circles, pulling Guinevere into a life-changing hurly-burly and social whirl that raise Miss Pettigrew's hopes-- and a few more eyebrows.
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| Miss Pettigrew uncovers illicit drug use. |
The story was adapted into a full-color romantic comedy in 2008, starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams; nonetheless and happily, the book reads like a vintage black-and-white film. It has a nifty bunch of black-and-white line drawings scattered throughout the text. In addition to Miss Pettigrew, we sample a few other Persephone titles that afternoon, including:
Persephone Books, 2008 (1940). 377 pages.
British Invasion, Oldies But Goodies
Penned by Charles Dickens’ great-granddaughter and reminiscent of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle and Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, Mariana is the story of a young English girl’s search for contentment and her growth toward maturity during the 1930s. Told in flashback, the novel opens with Mary (aka Mariana, from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem) waiting anxiously for news of her dashing young husband Sam, who has been reported missing during a World War II naval battle. In the course of one dark and stormy and agonizing night, we follow Mary through middling school days in Kensington and on rollicking holidays at a lovely rural estate. We fumble through unrecommended drama classes; we spend a year in Paris learning dressmaking and getting engaged to The Wrong Man. We bide some time as a personal secretary and paid companion. Simultaneously endearing and maddening, Mary-Mariana demonstrates limited aptitude for all but the falling-in-love and holiday-taking endeavors, suggesting that her somewhat comic coming-of-age story could be subtitled I Capture the Right Husband or, The Pursuit of Sense and Sensibility.
And now, a poetic interlude...
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound,
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, 'I am very dreary,
He will not come,' she said;
She wept, 'I am aweary, aweary,
O God, that I were dead!'
-from Mariana by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1830
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.Persephone Books, 2009. 308 pages.
British Invasion, Oldies But Goodies
British Invasion, Oldies But Goodies
Okay, okay, okay, this is not a practical reading exercise for Desperate or Non-Desperate Housewives of New Jersey. It's not going to rocket up the New York Times Book Review Advice and Miscellaneous List. But it is a lovely story, written by the author of beloved children's classic The Secret Garden. In Part One, statuesque and socially underestimated Emily Fox-Seton, whose employment involves performing mind-numbing tasks for Lady Maria Bayne, is invited to Lady Maria's country house to manage what promises to be a mind-numbing house party, which leads to several heartwarming love stories involving some of the mind-numbing and heartwarming guests. In Part Two, newly-made marchioness Emily is placed in grave danger, unsure of whether her called-away-on-marquis business husband Lord Walderhurst will return home to their fabulous estate in time to ensure her safety. Plenty of monocle-popping and eyebrow raising in this one, too.
Turns out, it's really really interesting to read about how a marchioness is made! Spoiler alert: it involves volunteering to salvage a sit-down dinner menu, traipsing across hill and dale in the heat of the day to a fish market, collapsing when one simply can't go on atop a strategically-placed idyllic meadow rock, sobbing daintily into a diminutive white handkerchief, unknowingly positioning yourself in the path of the marquis in question, who arrives in his barouche to rescue you and the rapidly deteriorating fish and to (gasp!) propose marriage. Sometimes a marchioness is made-- catch this, Sal-- simply by hauling fish and walking long distances in sub-optimal conditions.
Are you ready boots? Start walkin'! Speaking of raised eyebrows, we'll take another sip of that invigorating green iced tea and acknowledge our single and rather singular digression from literary conversation on that fine June afternoon: generally, the correct interpretation of body language in uncomfortable social situations and specifically, the limited yet awesome deployment of anatomical parts as weapons of social mass destruction. Going forward, when body language informs us that Our Friend Has Something She Needs to Get off Her Chest, we will recall this conversation and remember this instructional video clip:
Turns out, it's really really interesting to read about how a marchioness is made! Spoiler alert: it involves volunteering to salvage a sit-down dinner menu, traipsing across hill and dale in the heat of the day to a fish market, collapsing when one simply can't go on atop a strategically-placed idyllic meadow rock, sobbing daintily into a diminutive white handkerchief, unknowingly positioning yourself in the path of the marquis in question, who arrives in his barouche to rescue you and the rapidly deteriorating fish and to (gasp!) propose marriage. Sometimes a marchioness is made-- catch this, Sal-- simply by hauling fish and walking long distances in sub-optimal conditions.
Are you ready boots? Start walkin'! Speaking of raised eyebrows, we'll take another sip of that invigorating green iced tea and acknowledge our single and rather singular digression from literary conversation on that fine June afternoon: generally, the correct interpretation of body language in uncomfortable social situations and specifically, the limited yet awesome deployment of anatomical parts as weapons of social mass destruction. Going forward, when body language informs us that Our Friend Has Something She Needs to Get off Her Chest, we will recall this conversation and remember this instructional video clip:
Quite a skill set. We consider ourselves fully warned... and fully armed. Are you ready boots? Start walkin'!
Here’s an interesting tidbit: The excellent video Tonight Tonight is thematically inspired by the 1902 French silent film A Trip to the Moon, or Le Voyage dans la lune, the first-ever science fiction motion picture. Loosely based on From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells, Georges Méliès’ tiny little moony classic has enjoyed renewed attention because of Brian Selznick’s Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Martin Scorcese's film adaptation, Hugo.
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