The Hours is one of the subtlest novels you will ever pick up, yet also one of the most powerful and haunting. Nothing seems to really be happening, yet so much has already happened because everything interior is alive and well. Just as there is not much to be said about the impending grief of losing a dear friend to AIDS, why not realize the breeze and its whispers while fetching him flowers in an early spring morning full of possibility? Such is life. 

Therefore, instead of fashioning characters that hover above their banality, Michael Cunningham wisely chooses to locate personal stories amidst their everyday condition. Characters and their pasts meander in and out of their structured circumstances, showing their faces like hallowed ghosts. The choices that are revealed under such setting render the characters’ humanity, in all its shades, starker, and it is a very beautiful thing to witness. Standing tall on the shoulders of Virginia Woolf’s vision in Mrs Dalloway, The Hours is perched as a fitting postmodern companion. The durable scaffold of the former is revived as a recurrent situational text for reality referencing in the latter. However, what is borrowed are never the mere details and manners of one era (early 20th century England), but the common emotional undercurrents that echo through time, such that the years that divide them erode away, only to exist as convenient chapters of one same book. Cunningham knows this, and here, his interpretation allows a re-reading of Woolf, updating her text with an urgent contemporary relevance. This is a great personal homage that is tastefully done. The visionary is dead, long live the visionary. Unlike in Specimen Days (c.f. Walt Whitman was his muse) where this strategy was employed to a slightly contrived and inconsistent effect, the result here is an intricately-woven cross-stitch of life’s tapestry that is ‘equally poised between despair and the desire to live’ (Meryl Streep, 2002).

Contributed by: s.t

About to start in on the new novel. Feels a bit like standing on top of a cliff trying to gather courage to leap into the roaring sea below, staring at the waves crashing, trying to familiarise myself with them, reminding myself how to swim. But there’s only one thing to do. JUMP!

Michael Cunningham (author of  The Hours) says,

“A writer should always feel like he’s in over his head. That’s part of what makes good writing compelling – the sense that as readers we’re in the company of a writer of vast ambitions, who is always trying to do more than he or she is technically capable of.”

Well, that’s me, vast ambitions and in WAY over my head.

Aiming for a thousand words a day and a full draft done by the end of June. Who’s with me?

Love to all,

Edwina

It’s not often a book leaves me completely speechless. Wowed. Awestruck. Absolutely blown away. But then again, it’s not often that I come across a book like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Both, Claire and Rachel, recommended the book to me, saying I should read it once I finish Mrs. Dalloway. And then, I saw this fantastic review over at deucekindred’s blog, and I felt compelled to read the book sooner rather than later – specially as I’d just finished the Virginia Woolf classic as part of Woolf In Winter.

In the first chapter, Clarissa, a fifty-something year old woman, steps out to buy some flowers for a party she’s having that evening. She loves the city she’s in, enjoys the hustle-bustle of life, bumps into an old friend, and contemplates the perfect party that evening.

However, unlike Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa isn’t in London this time, but in New York. It’s not the 1920s anymore, but we’ve fast-forwarded to 1999. And, Clarissa isn’t Mrs. Dalloway, but, she’s Clarissa Vaughn. Her best friend, Richard (a poet suffering from AIDS), does call her Mrs. Dalloway after the famous fictional character though…

While the book chronicles a day in her life, as she plans the perfect party (in honour of Richard), much like Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the book also chronicles one day in the life of two other women in different times and places: Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and Laura Brown in Los Angeles in the 1940s. All three stories are interspersed with one another, resulting in a heartbreaking emotional masterpiece, that illustrates that despite the barriers of time and space, lives do interlock.

The second chapter is when we’re introduced to the legendary author in the 1920s. Virginia Woolf’s account is semi-fictional. She’s ill, refers to herself as an eccentric genius, and lives in Richmond with her supportive loving husband, trying to recuperate, but missing London dreadfully. Cunningham imagines Woolf in the initial stages of writing Mrs. Dalloway – her thoughts, her inspirations and her character development – as well as her illness, and her fragile state of mind.

She despises Richmond. She is starved for London; she dreams sometimes about the hearts of cities. Here, where she been taken to live for the last eight years precisely because it is neither strange now marvellous, she is largely free of headaches and voices, the fits of rage. Here all she desires is a return to the dangers of city life.

And the third chapter introduces us to Laura Brown in the 1940s. Mrs. Brown is the wife of a World War II veteran, and she has a three year old child. She’s a recluse, an obsessive reader, who is working her way through all of Woolf’s fiction, and has just started Mrs. Dalloway. And, she has suicidal tendencies.

Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book – she is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.

The prologue is set in 1941: a new War has just begun, and Woolf is walking purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do. The prologue ends with her husband discovering her suicide note… and me feeling incredibly overwhelmed, just eight pages in. Cunningham doesn’t mince words, doesn’t beat around the bush, but the language is wonderfully concise, while being eloquent and metaphoric.

Cunningham also makes subtle changes to the story of Mrs. Dalloway, to illustrate its timelessness and universality. Moving from one big city to the city that never sleeps, making Clarissa lovers with Sally, and Richard taking on Septimus’ role (I think), are just some of the quirks that makes the story read almost completely differently. However, if you read this book prior to reading Mrs. Dalloway, I strongly suggest reading the classic.

And then, we get into the intricacies. According to this work, Woolf intended Clarissa to be the suicidal character in her novel – that despite her love for life, some small domestic failure could potentially push her over the edge. Say, her party being a failure? From what we know of Clarissa Dalloway, would that be so impossible? Was Clarissa Dalloway merely a reflection of Woolf herself? Or, was fiction and reality still two completely different threads for Woolf in the 1920s?

Someone else will die. It should be a greater mind than Clarissa’s; it should be someone with sorrow and genius enough to turn away from the seductions of the world, its cups and its coats.

This is a multi-layered story, with enough allusions to merit a thesis of sorts. I’m still left flabbergasted as to how much I loved this book, and how little justice (if any) I’ve done to its genius with my extremely trite review. What leaves me really puzzled is, how on earth did the author pack in so much in just 226 pages? Details, amazing descriptions, incredible characterisations and an enthralling storyline of three complex women, while simultaneously reworking one of the greatest classics of the last century, Cunningham’s book is pure gold.

Like many of you, I feel that for some time now I’ve been reading like a writer. In other words, when I’m reading, I’m also noticing: tense shifts, point of view, use of time, distance between the narrator and the characters, the movement in and out of scenes…

In 1999 I was so amazed by Michael Cunningham’s The Hours–its structure, its use of repetition–that I reread it in order see what he had done. I circled. I underlined. I used Excel and made a chart. I cited page numbers.

Recently at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, another student suggested I listen to the CD of a lecture given by Douglas Glover last summer on “How to Read Like a Writer.” In that lecture he said that to read like a writer, we should learn how to take a story apart. I thought, right, I know that.

But it wasn’t until a few days after that, when I actually took apart a couple of the Alice Munro stories in her new collection, Too Much Happiness, that I finally GOT how to read like a writer–or how to take reading like a writer to a new level–and how that could help me make choices when I was writing.

So the first time I read, I read for pleasure. I underline passages I like, and I notice what’s working and what’s not. Then the second time I read, I read to answer questions.

Other posts in this series:

Part 1: Reading like a writer

Part 2: Taking it to a new level

Part 3: Questions to ask

Part 4: Reading a story

Part 5: Taking a story apart

The book contains the stories of 3 different characters; Virginia Woolf in 1923, Mrs. Dalloway in the ’90s, and Laura Brown in 1949. Each narrative details a day in the life of each woman much as the novel Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf, does. Though I have yet to read Mrs. Dalloway, I gather that the writing style is also quite similar – a stream of consciousness style that slips over and around the thoughts of the characters as they go about their day. Each character faces death in this novel and there doesn’t seem to be any joy at all to look forward to or past happiness to dwell on. I found the whole thing horribly depressing! The best part, in more ways than one, was the ending. The author allows a small glimmer of hopefulness to scuttle through the cracks. Why do people love this novel so much? It must be the writing. I thought it was unbearably ambiguous and too full of despair for my liking and, aside from the Virginia Woolf character, I really had no sympathy for anyone else in the novel. Reading this wasn’t a complete waste of time, but it wasn’t an experience that I would want to repeat.

Posted by Anbolyn

Trisha at eclectic / eccentric has a really fun post, Adaptations Lists and Giveaways, where she’s listed 5 books that she wishes were movies, and 5 books that she wishes never were.  I have to agree with her on Eragon, one of the worst travesties done to a book EVER, but not on a few of the others.  I enjoyed reading hers so much, I wanted to play to   So here’s my 5 and 5.

FIVE books that I’d trade a body part to be movies:

1. Nation by Terry Pratchett ~ It was fantastic, funny, had a great message, and it just lent itself to visualization.  AND it’d have gorgeous South Pacific scenery that would be breath-taking on a big screen.  I think that’d be worth a spleen, at least… I mean, what does that thing do, anyway?
2. The Stephanie Plum Novels by Janet Evanovich ~ I’d trade a kidney for a TV series of this.  Grandma Mazur, in my living room, every week.  Oh, that would almost make up for the end of LOST!
3. Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism by Georgia Byng ~ It’d be worth a lung lobe just to watch a gummy Miss Adderstone use her false teeth like castanets.  And I think they could do a lot of fun stuff visually with the hypnotism.  Oh, any movie can be improved by throwing a pug dog in the story
4. Goblins! An UnderEarth Adventure by Royce Buckingham ~ Goblins.  SNOT. and it’s all underground.  It’d be a good cult classic.  Ok, so I LOVE movies like A Gnome Named Gnorm… and am apparently alone in that given it’s 4 out of 10 stars rating, Super Mario Bros, and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, and I think this one could be a cool movie.
5. Homer’s Odyssey by Gwen Cooper ~  Okay, I’d trade a cornea for this one.  El Mochito, the Daredevil, the blind Wonder Cat who defends his mom from the burglar, and whose heart is so big that he enraptures everyone who ever meets him… well, except for Lawrence.  He was too smitten with Vashti.  It’d be way better than that Marley & Me movie, and BEST OF ALL, the cat would still be alive at the end.  Gawd, I hated the end of Marley.  I don’t want to think about my pets dying.  I know it’ll happen, but don’t put it in my “feel-good” movie.  Marley & Me was like being a manic/depressive for 110 minutes… and I still gave it 5 stars at Netflix. 

There should be a special place in HELL for the people who made thes FIVE books into movies:

1. The Inheritance Cycle (or the movie Eragon) by Christopher Paolini, obviously.  A place in Hell where they’re forced to sit in front of a movie screen and endure inane details of a random person’s life, but NEVER get anything good or inspiring or accurate.  Every good part was cut from the books and then they watered down the surface story, left even more out, and called it a movie.  First off, ERAGON is the name of ONE book, and yet they made the whole book series in this one movie.  Nasuada is one of my favorite characters, and she’s an important character, but she’s no where in the movie.  What about Eragon’s training with the Elves?  and where’s Solombum, the were-cat?  Grr… horrible rendering.
2. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards ~ That movie sucked so bad, I actually dropped my rating on the book after watching it.  The book was complex and had depth, but the movie was just weak.  Whoever made THAT drivel should be stripped of their sense of smell, have their taste buds seared off, be stricken color-blind and then spend eternity seated at a table loaded with all their favorite foods.
3. Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King ~ You know, the sad thing about this one is, SK himself approved the script.  The book itself has 2 novella stories to it, one centered around playing Hearts at college, and the second where the guy’s an alien hiding out and other aliens come looking for him.   But the movie has NONE of the Hearts to it, and what’s left of the Atlantis part is stripped of all the magic that made me love it.  In the end, it’s just another lousy Stephen King book-to-movie.
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ~ Honestly, it’s not the movie makers fault that it was a bad book-to-movie.  There was NO WAY for them to translate all that goes on inside the narrator’s head, the nuances of the people, and the sense of fear/doom/loss/inadequacy that made up this book.  It wasn’t JUST about him not standing up for his friend and allowing him to be hurt, but it’s about how that one moment was the still point that his whole life and identity grew out of.  I think it’s fair to give the movie people a pardon on this one.
5. The Hours by Michael Cunningham ~ Okay, I’ve never read the book, so I can’t say whether they did a bad job of making the movie, but here is what I can say:  After watching that movie, I would NEVER read the book.  What’s more, I don’t want to go near a Virgina Woolfe book because of it.  It gave me the impression that her books are very depressing and I’d want to kill myself after reading it.  I might’ve read one of her books before that, I think I even have Mrs. Dalloway somewhere, but every time I think about her books, I think about drowning myself in the bathtub and it’s all because of that movie.

A couple books being made into movies that I’m reserving space on my WORST movie adaptations EVER mental list are:

• The Giver by Lois Lowry ~ right now, it’s set to come out 2011, but that’ll probably get pushed back.  It’s suppose to be done by the director who did the last few Harry Potter movies, so they’ve had to wait for those to wrap up. I just can’t see how this book could work as a movie for the same reasons The Kite Runner was a miss.  There’s so much going on mentally, how can they show that on the screen?
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy ~ Viggo Mortensen as the man… big, big plus.  It could really be another Mad Max or Blade Runner and be a raging success, but it could just as easily tank hard.  It’s another one of those mental books, though the scenery could be amazing.  They HAVE to have the cellar scene in it, though, or it’ll be a deal breaker.
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak ~ The book was perfection.  A movie will screw it up.  There’s NO WAY it can be done.

Oh, and by the way… Don’t forget to Trisha’s having a contest for this:

Giveaway:

If you make a post about this topic and leave a link in the comments section, I will 1) add you to the list below and 2) enter you into a giveaway for one of the following books:

1.  It’s Easy Being Green by Crissy Trask
2.  No Touch Monkey by Ayun Halliday
3.  Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4.  The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The contest closes at midnight January 17.

So what books do you think would be a hit or were a miss?

I honestly feel that I’m doing the book a disservice by writing a review but anyway here goes :

The only Michael Cunningham novel I have read is A Home at the end of the World and I loved it. To this day I still reflect about it’s contents. Now I knew about The Hours reputation so I had an inkling that I would not be disappointed.  When finishing the book  an onrush of indescribable feelings surged through me.  Even four hours after reading that last sentence im shaking.

The chronicles one day in the life of three women in three different eras and places. First is 1920’s London and the author Virginia Woolf is planning out the rough sketches for Mrs. Dalloway. Then we jump to New York in the late nineties, where we meet Clarissa who is preparing a party for her best friend who is dying of AIDS and the third story focuses on Laura Brown in 1940’s LA, who is reading Mrs. Dalloway and is preparing (with her son) a birthday meal for her husband.

All three women are united by the fictional Mrs. Dalloway. I am not going to go into detail over here but the themes which run through the novel are Suicide, Lesbianism, writing, alienation and the need to break free are just some of the uniting factors.  Cunningham ties everything together brilliantly but this plot isn’t the only reason why I was elevated by this novel.

Cunningham’s use of language is simply astounding. The Hours reads like one long poem. Each simile and metaphor will grab you. Never have descriptions affected me so. Also it’s only a 225 page book so in order to get so much when using such little space also left me speechless.

I know I am probably overdoing it on the hyperbole front but it’s very rare that book does this to me so I savor it.

Has anyone else out there felt the same way about this book?

This is the second post in a series we’ll call “The Best and Worst,” in which, you know, I talk about the best and worst of book related things. The first post is The Best Books I’ve Ever Read, and I’m going to do one about really horrible books as soon as I figure out if it’s worth picking on Twilight or if that ship has already sailed.

Now, books based on movies can be a touchy subject for some people, especially people who have had beloved classics from their childhood destroyed by Hollywood (makers of Ella Enchanted, I’m looking at you right now), but I believe that good movies can be made from books. I don’t consider a good movie-based-on-a-book to be one that follows the source material absolutely, but one that maintains the core theme of the work in question, and represents that work the best it can in a cinematic way.

This list might be a little wonky, because I’ve limited it to movies based on books I’ve actually read.

Angels & Demons

I know that this might not be what people think of when they think of a great movie, and it didn’t follow the original source material too closely, but it took the basic idea – a symbologist uncovers a plot to gain power in the Catholic church while helping a physicist find the antimatter she mislaid – and made it look rather pretty on screen.  I’m giving this movie a hell of a lot of credit because it made me actually like something Dan Brown had his hands on. I despise Dan Brown, because he’s a horrible writer and mixes fact and fiction with no regard to either, but this was a decent movie.

The Hours

I loved the movie, I loved the book. Both are the story of three women – Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Woolf (like, THE Virginia Woolf), and Mrs. Brown – as they go about their normal every day life. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’s a beautiful, heartbreaking story, and the movie captured the feeling of the book. Some of the moments in the book that were sad were even more gut wrenching in the movie, like Virginia Woolf’s suicide at the beginning of the movie. Mostly, I love this book (and this movie) because of the way the three women are intertwined, the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.   Virginia is writing it while the action of the book takes place, Mrs. Brown is reading it, and Mrs. Dalloway (whose real name is Clarissa Vaughn),  is the embodiment of Virginia Woolf’s character. If you haven’t seen either of these, I suggest you give them a try.

Lord of the Rings

I’m not the biggest Lord of the Rings fan, mostly because the movies came out when I was a wee bit too young for them, and then I tried reading the books, which are a little daunting for someone in elementary school.  I mean, I got through them, but I had to skip a lot of the songs and speeches and use the indexes and appendices in the back a lot.  The Lord of the Rings movies, I feel, condensed all that was good about the books, and took out the boring, kind of extraneous bits, leaving fast paced, action filled, suspense ridden films.  Well done, Peter Jackson, well done.

Fight Club

Come on, I had to put this on here. I’m probably one of the few people my age who read the book before they watched the movie.  Fight Club, as a book, is kind of a trippy experience, since Chuck Palahniuk seems dedicated to making sure that you feel as disjointed from time as his main character, and I really did not notice for the first half of the book that the main character didn’t have a name. Since I read the book and already knew what happened, the twist in the story in the movie didn’t have much of an impact, but the way they demonstrated it was quite clever. But the fact that I already knew what was going to happen in the movie didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it at all, which I think is one of those things that makes a good film. Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton (does anyone else think Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Edward Norton look a lot alike?) all give exemplary performances, and the movie’s just really nice to look at. The filmmakers really got down the grittiness of what Palahiniuk wrote.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I know that the movie of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pissed off some longtime Hitchhiker’s fans because it veered wildly around the original plot, but whatever. Douglas Adams helped write the script! Douglas! So, any changes are okay with me. Plus, they kept in the important things – Zaphod’s second head, Trillian (man, I love Trillian), Marvin, Deep Thought, and the handy excerpts from the Guide itself. The little bits from the Guide are probably my favorite part about this movie, since they’re voiced by Stephen Fry, and have little illustrations to go along with them. The only thing I didn’t like about the movie was the weird romance between Arthur Dent and Trillian.  I guess it kind of makes sense because they’re the only two humans left in the universe, and Trillian’s played by Zooey Deschanel who is just a romance subplot kind of girl, but I missed Fenchurch.

Coraline

Coraline is kind of a special book for me for one reason – it’s the first book I remember reading that actually scared me. Like, can’t sleep at night, go sleep in your mother’s room scared. I picked it up in one of those Scholastic Book Fairs our school had (man, I wish they had those for colleges, they were totally awesome), and read it the next day, and then buried it deep in my shelves.  It took me about a year after I’d burned through most of Neil Gaiman’s bibliography – Sandman, Good Omens, American Gods, etc. – to realize that terrifying little book from my past was written by him. And then the movie came out, and it was awesome.  I cannot tell you how much I love stop motion animation, and how much I hate the 3D cartoons that are quickly becoming industry standard.  The makers of Coraline took Gaiman’s book and crafted a beautiful little world around it, that still remained precisely as scary as that book was for little nine-year old me – my littlest sister, who was around the same age I was when I read the book, watched the movie and thought it was great, but covered her eyes six or seven times. That’s the sign of a good kid’s movie. They need something that scares them a little bit, that challenges them.

That’s all I got. I feel like the Harry Potter movies should maybe be on here, but I can’t really connect Harry Potter the books with Harry Potter the movies in my mind because they’ve ended up being so different in so many ways, so I left them off.  What movies based on books did you like? Did you like the movie or the book better?

Everybody’s doing it, so why not me? Top 10 lists are always fun, so I present to you my completely biased, non-authoritative lists of my top 10 books and top 10 movies of 2000-2009.

Books

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
3. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
7. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
9. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
10. Blue Angel by Francine Prose

Please note that 8 of these books could comfortably be classified as science fiction/fantasy. One is nonfiction (Omnivore’s Dilemma), and one is literary fiction but it’s about writers, one of my favorite subjects, if done well (Blue Angel).

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh; Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill; Just After Sunset by Stephen King; Mystic River by Dennis Lehane; No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy; The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Movies

1. No Country for Old Men
2. The Children of Men
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
4. Zodiac
5. Little Miss Sunshine
6. Mystic River
7. Adaptation
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
9. Unbreakable
10. There Will Be Blood

Honorable Mentions: Donnie Darko; Red Dragon; Serenity; Napoleon Dynamite; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Star Trek; The Dark Knight; The Royal Tenenbaums; Memento; Brokeback Mountain; District 9

Amazingly enough, 7 of these movies are adaptations of favorite books of mine. Usually, they don’t get the book to film thing right.

After reading Manohla Dargis’ piece in the New York Times and her subsequent interview with Jezebel.com, I felt the need to write the following open letter to the heads of all the feature film studios in the United States.

Dear Sirs (+ the one madam co-chair):

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Ashley, I am one of your customers. One of your 51 percent, to be exact. Ironically, I’m also on the cusp of two age brackets that seem to allude you. Being 28 years old, I’m just edging past your “Twilight” audience and will soon hit your 35+ when-its-a-hit-it-must-be-a-fluke audience. Not only am I one of your customers, but I also happen to be one of you, albeit a very low-level one of you. I feel this puts me in a unique situation, I know your audience because I am your audience; AND, because I’m somewhat of an insider, I’ve struck upon a solution to your problem. A solution that will make you even more money than you’re making now. I’m talking Twilight, The Dark Night, and Mamma Mia kind of money. Believe-it-or-not, it’s not as hard as you think and it’s actually something you know how to do already: make movies. But not just any movies; movies that 51 percent of your audience can relate to and which feature the work of those members of our 51 percent who make their careers in feature film.

Don’t get me wrong, I know you get cross-over audiences. I’m just as likely to see a romantic comedy as I am the next Bourne movie, but I’m even more likely to see a Bourne movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow. I’d probably even go back for seconds if you decided to expand Julia Stiles’ character or give Joan Allen’s more of a back story. Like Bourne, I want to know what taunts them, what makes them tick and what makes them want to find Jason Bourne (because, let’s face it, it’s beyond just their professional duty at this point).

I like stories with style and substance, but I also like action, chase scenes and even my fair share of violence. My favorite movie is “The Silence of the Lambs.” “SOTL” is a great example of how to make a movie that grabs 100 percent of your adult audience: follow the hero’s journey. In this case, the hero just happens to be a 5′ tall heroine and her unlikely leading man is a serial killing cannibal. There’s blood, guts, gore and most importantly, STORY. Both men and women alike invest in these characters because we learn what makes them tick. But women have an extra investment in this particular story (this is the reason why we go back to see it again, recommend it to our friends, buy it, download it, etc.) we see ourselves up on the screen, a lone woman among men in an elevator. Every woman has experienced that moment, just as every woman’s secret desire (like Agent Starling’s) is to save the world.

I also like my romantic comedies to be smart. Yes, I do like to see pretty things and pretty people on a screen, but I’m not an idiot either. I’d trade in a beautiful set and a character’s designer wardrobe for a really good story. Make more movies like “When Harry Met Sally.” Those characters had a story and they had great conversations about things we all discuss at dinner parties or over the phone with friends. Many elements of the script came from actual conversations between Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron. And guess what? That movie appealed to men as well. Why? Two reasons: 1) They saw themselves in Billy Crystal: he is the every man and he got the girl; 2) Insight into women. Yes, we sometimes fake orgasms. Now you know.

The “Buddy Movie” (now recoined as the “Bromance” or “A Judd Apatow”) We, the 51 percent of your audience, have only one of these movies to stick a flag in and call our own: “Thelma and Louise.”  This movie was made in 1991. Oh, wait, there was another female buddy movie! In 2002, producer Cathy Konrad put out a hilarious flick (penned by Nancy Pimental) called “The Sweetest Thing.” I was in college. I saw it two times on opening weekend with seven other female friends. It still remains the closest we’ll ever get to “The Hangover” for women. Speaking of which, if  ”The Hangover” was pitched with an entirely female cast, it would never have gotten made. Though I have no doubt there would have been an audience for it — made up of both genders.

The drama (aka “The Oscar movie” or “The Meryl Streep”). In their current state, these movies have a slightly better shot at appealing to me and my fellow 51 percenters because they feature more screen time for women (usually women who can no longer wrinkle their foreheads, but that’s a different letter for another day). The funny thing about these movies is that they’re rarely directed and/or written by women. Though I love men who can write wonderful parts for women (hello, Michael Cunningham), they are not women, and, as such, they will always leave the character with an unexplored territory. It’s one thing for a woman to be mysterious, but another thing to leave 51 percent of us knowing there is so much more to the story that needs to be told. “The Hours” has a great scene which touches upon this, when Clarissa Vaughn talks to her daughter about a moment in her youth:

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.”

Contained within those lines are two potential movies for two generations of women, “the sense of possibility” movie, reaching audiences from their late teens – 30s, and “the moment looking back” movie, for the 40/50/60 female audience. I want to know what that woman sees as both a 20-something and then as a 50-something woman. Romantic comedies offer shades of these moments as well, though they are even fewer and farther between.

I believe women go to rom coms and dramas because they crave any glimmer of seeing their lives reflected back at them, no matter how fleeting of a moment it may be. We women store up a mosaic of these moments and play them back in our minds when we need them. A “greatest hits” if you will. They are our touchstone, our reminder that we are seen, we are remembered; we do serve a purpose. But wouldn’t it be even better if we didn’t need a highlights reel? If the marquee at our local theaters advertised movies where we saw ourselves and our husbands/boyfriends/friends/girlfriends/teens depicted by someone like us who knows the way we think, the way we see, who gives us not “women’s movies” but movies from our perspective? And, maybe even a woman who gives us male viewpoints just as dramatically or funny as the Michael Manns or Judd Apatows of the world, but from a fresh perspective.

I am one of your 51 percent. And, I am also your colleague. I want to see a reflection of myself on a screen just as much as I want to see my name in the credits. I am a part of both sides of this letter. And, I will keep moving forward both from my seat and on a set, until my voice is heard. Because when it finally is, there will be 51 percent of the world’s population behind it. I hope you start listening.

-Ashley Van Buren

Author : MAHARANI, DYTTA

This thesis presents an analysis on Clarissa Vaughn who changes her sex preference from a heterosexual person into a lesbian in Cunningham?s The Hours. It discusses the external and the internal factors that influence her in changing her sex preference. In order to accomplish the object from this thesis, I use literary devices, both characterization and conflict, and also supported by the concept of lesbian lifestyle. The theory of characterization is used to find out how one character influences the main character. The theory of conflict is used to show the final decision of Clarissa in choosing the choice of being a lesbian or return to be a heterosexual. Last, the term of lesbian is used to show that Clarissa is really a lesbian based on her lifestyle. Clarissa Vaughn is not a lesbian since her childhood. There are external and internal factors that make her change her sex preference. The external factors that make her change her sex preference are Richard and Sally. The internal factors are Clarissa?s character traits. Furthermore, Clarissa realizes that living as a lesbian is the right choice for her. Finally, as the conclusion, I reveal that Richard, Sally and Clarissa?s character trait have become the factors that make her change her sex preference from a heterosexual person into a lesbian. Moreover, heterosexual relationship is not the only way to make a life happier for Clarissa. I also conclude that lesbians do not only come from nature process, however, experience in the past can also influence some people to change a sex preference.

Keyword : american fiction, michael cunningham, the hours, sex preference, lesbian

Sumber : http://repository.petra.ac.id/2162/

I haven’t thought of Walt Whitman in years, but recently he seems to have made a fairly significant return to my life.  I’m reading Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham…brilliant as always. The story weaves the thread of Whitman throughout, from his poetry to Cunningham’s character creations. Cunningham characters are allegory to Whitman’s poetry.

Now, enter a new Levi’s commercial directed by the amazing Ryan McGeary whose images are set to music and a haunting performance of Pioneers O’ Pioneers, taken from an obscure 1950s album of Whitman’s poetry.

I wasn’t sure what to think of the commercial at first, wondering what Whitman’s words had to do with selling jeans. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was with Whitman’s words against the backdrop of American Youth and the concept of stepping beyond oneself and becoming something more by changing the world, exploring a new undiscovered country within ourselves. So, after googling Pioneers again and reading the poem several times, I started searching out what others were saying about the Levi’s commercial. This blog has some very interesting comments from literary students about the merits of the commercial with some very strong opinions on both sides.  I always find discussions about brands interesting but this one seems to have piqued my interest even more.  Perhaps because of the Cunningham novel I’m reading. Needless to say, some very divergent ideas about Whitman’s poem, the imagery and ideas about neo-socialism and other comparisons. Ultimately though, I think Derek Dukes made the best argument.  He said:

“I too was led to google ‘Pioneers Oh Pioneers’ and discover that it was in fact a Whitman poem.

I don’t really view this as commercialization of Art, the commercial seems to draw a connection between the Levi brand, which came out of Pioneers heading west heading the call of Manifest Destiny. It seems there’s a good case to be made that over the years Levi’s have been the chosen fashion for Pioneers, from the Gold Rush miner 49-ers, beat poets like jack kerouac, 50’s rebels like James Dean & Elivs to today’s urban hipsters on fixies. Like it or not, Levi’s have been a key piece of identity for American Pioneers.

This is the second set of ads I’ve seen that shift from a ‘our brand is awesome’ message to a ‘you’re awesome, we help you be awesome’ message. The other set of ads are the Quaker Oats ‘Go Humans’ ads.”

I’m going to think on this concept of “you’re awesome, we help you be awesome,” and blog about that later.

Without drawing my own conclusions about the meaning behind the commercial, I can appreciate the medium as art and with all good art, it generates discussion.  Truly, the worst thing in the world is to be boring.  It’s great when people talk about you.  Either way.  It’s when the marketing gods smile on us.

Art in many forms, is … well, art. And personally, I love it when art like Whitman’s is revived, shared, discussed and again shows us what it really is…immortal.

What do you think of the commercial? I’d love to hear from you.

Leí Las Horas por el revuelo crítico que causó la película del mismo título, aunque yo no la había visto todavía; lo que es un riesgo a veces y, otras, una bendición. No sabía nada de su autor,  Michael Cunningham, más sí del director de la versión cinematográfica (Stephen Daldry), y del maravilloso plantel de actores de la misma. Es uno de los pocos casos en los que me vi abocado a leer una novela debido a una película. Y ambas me sorprendieron.

Las Horas no es una historia fácil. Ni pretende serlo. Porque no se deja leer con facilidad. Está llena de estuarios que son miradas y gestos; de silencios que bullen con los sonidos de recuerdos sofocados; brota del dolor y al dolor retorna; se asienta en la desesperación llegando, sin embargo, a la calma. Y, a pesar de todo, o debido a todo, la historia fluye, fluye a través de sus páginas con una sutileza admirable sin detenerse nunca, sin dar respiro al lector. La historia imbricada de tres mujeres que en nada se parecen pero que son tan similares; el ambiente de cada una, opresivo, abigarrado, lleno de las naderías de la existencia normal; los sentimientos que las hermanan; la desidia que las corroe; la lucha que las iguala; y, finalmente, el dolor que las reproduce. Porque son mujeres que dan fruto: se quedan en nuestro corazón y se mantienen, flotando como espíritus benevolentes, por muchos días. Y ése es el mérito de Michael Cunningham: trasciende una historia triple, opresiva, dura y desesperada, en la que triunfa el individuo, el ser, y ese triunfo lo mide en intangibilidad, en evocación, en nada. Fascinante.

Las Horas es un libro magnético, escrito con esa sencillez casi minimalista que caracteriza a cierta prosa norteamericana llena de trazos de Hopper, con su desolación y desesperanza, en la que la vida de tres mujeres tan diferentes en tiempo y espacio, se imbrican a través de la fascinación que sienten una por la otra, por la fantasía de una historia que se gesta y que es contada y por las consecuencias que nuestros actos siempre tienen, en los demás (algo tan freudiano que quizá debiera pasar de una vez de moda) y sobre todo, y más que todo añadiría yo, en nosotros mismos. Son tres mujeres llenas de flaquezas; interiormente rudas y plenas; que luchan por salir a la superficie y por respirar el aroma de la verdadera libertad: la ausencia de unas ataduras inútiles, el batir de las alas al remontar el vuelo, y el bramar de la tierra al quedarse atrás… Las Horas contiene en las horas que pasan cada uno de los sueños, cada una de las ideas y de los sentimientos atormentados y atrapados de estas mujeres que luchan, luchan siempre y siempre contra sí mismas, sin importarles nada. Son verdaderas artistas, capaces de desangrarse a sí mismas, y a los que les rodean, para conseguir sentirse plenamente ellas mismas, seres únicos, indiscutibles, serenos y, a la postre, libres.

La versión cinematográfica es igual de fascinante. Engatusa al espectador con la fluidez de las imágenes, con el baile de miradas, de sensaciones (todo se toca, se huele, se saborea en la distancia; todo se observa desde dentro y desde fuera: los besos, las caricias, las soledades) y de angustias, que culminan en el parto de una idea que evoca, en otro tiempo y lugar, la libertad de una mujer hastiada y la angustia de una mujer encerrada entre un amor imposible y un amor que le puede dar lo que más ansía: la libertad. Porque, a pesar de ser una obra de desesperación y de angustia por conseguir ser individuos al completo, Las Horas es el canto a la libertad real, a la libertad de espíritu y de facto, aquella que sólo somos capaces de darnos a nosotros mismos y que, quizá, nos costaría menos, o la saborearíamos mejor, si comprendiésemos que los que nos rodean nos aman lo suficiente como para dejar que seamos lo que deberíamos ser.

Y la belleza de las imágenes, la transparencia de cada una de las extraordinarias creaciones del elenco de actores; la ambientación detallada; las luces, las sombras, las reacciones, los detalles, las flores y los aromas, no valdrían de nada sin la maravillosa banda sonora creada por Philip Glass, llena de incisión, de voluntad; tan amable con el espectador como la misma historia, tan brillante sin embargo en su casi desaparecer, y tan fluida, que hilvana las horas que pasan con el ritmo incesante de lo que no tiene fin. Y que queda grabada en la mente y el corazón, con la resonancia de lo verdadero, una vez se cierra el último plano y cesa el arrullo de su ritmo.

La mia lingua privata al vaglio di un editor
Da «Panta» per gli 80 anni della Bompiani
Ho imparato anni fa, con mia grande sorpresa, che scrivere non è affatto l’impresa totalmente solitaria che si crede comunemente sia. Sì, per la maggior parte è un lavoro enormemente solitario, di una solitudine quasi massacrante – mentre si scrive un romanzo ci si sente come Raperonzolo, con i capelli non abbastanza lunghi per arrivare dalla stanza della torre al terreno sottostante, e non c’è mai un principe a portata di mano. Ma alla fine, dopo mesi o anni di lavoro, uno scrittore arriva al punto in cui il libro non è veramente finito ed è in una fase di stallo. Sai che non è il libro che potrebbe essere, ma non riesci a capire cosa ci sia di sbagliato; figuriamoci se riesci a capire come mettere a posto qualunque cosa ci sia di sbagliato.
L’ovvia spiegazione per questo stato di cose è che hai esaurito qualunque forma di obiettività tu possa avere un giorno avuto. Ma io credo che la verità sia più sottile e più difficile da trattare. Ciò che accade, quando un libro è quasi finito ma non lo è del tutto, è che tu, lo scrittore, ti ritrovi faccia a faccia con la tua capacità di smettere di parlare nel tuo personale linguaggio e iniziare a parlare la lingua della gente della Terra. Tutti i romanzi sono lavori di traduzione, anche le versioni originali, anche quando sono scritti dall’autore nella sua lingua madre. Sono traduzioni per il fatto che lo scrittore, qualunque scrittore che abbia qualche capacità, aveva in mente un libro più grandioso, un libro più profondo, più comico e tragico, più penetrante, più toccante, e quello che alla fine viene fuori sulla carta è piuttosto una traduzione approssimativa di quella invisibile, ineffabile versione che ha fluttuato sopra il suo capo per mesi o anni. Qualunque sensazione di sgomento lo scrittore possa provare quando osserva ciò che dovrebbe essere la versione finale – questo non è affatto quello che pensavo, non parla di ciò che credevo parlasse, e dove sono le altezze, dove sono le profondità? – non viene, come ho detto, in nessun modo aiutata dal fatto che gli scrittori, come tutti, parlano un dialetto strettamente personale, una versione assolutamente privata della loro lingua di appartenenza, in cui certe parole hanno definizioni deviate, altre parole hanno per chi parla un significato molto più importante di quanto lo abbiano per molte persone e, forse la cosa più importante, certi termini e certe frasi hanno doppi significati, connotazioni e risonanze che sono ovvi per chi parla e assolutamente misteriosi per chiunque altro.
[...]

Qui è, in breve, dove l’editor entra in scena. L’editor è in un certo senso il primo traduttore. Un editor, un buon editor, protegge le idiosincrasie e le eccentricità di un libro (anzi, magnifica e intensifica le idiosincrasie e le eccentricità di un libro) e nello stesso tempo rende chiaro ciò che è troppo oscuro per il 99,9% dei lettori, rende sottile ciò che è dolorosamente e goffamente ovvio (noi scrittori, che tendiamo al narcisismo, possiamo sottovalutare la capacità di percezione dei nostri lettori). Un buon editor parla allo scrittore di ciò che ha senso per lo scrittore solo, e di ciò che con ogni probabilità avrà senso anche per quelli che per avventura non abitano nella testa dello scrittore.

[...]

da Il manifesto, 4 novembre 2009

Traduzione di Ivan Cotroneo

Specimen Days, much like The Hours before it, consists of 3 separate yet intertwining stories at the heart of which is the poetry of Walt Whitman. I should start by saying that I’m not particularly interested in poetry, so before this I hadn’t read anything by Mr. Whitman. And this book, though I enjoyed it, did nothing to spark my interest in the poet. Also, I definitely would choose The Hours over this any day, but probably because, at the time, I felt some kind of personal connection with it which I still can’t completely shake off. If anyone asked me about my favorite books, The Hours would be in there, so this was a tough act to follow; in fact, until reading Dragos’s post on the book, I didn’t really want to read another book by Mr. Cunningham for fear of being disappointed. But this is all really personal, and probably has nothing to do with literary value

These 3 stories happen in 3 different historical moments: past (late 1800s), present (early 200s) and future (some 150 years in the future) but in the same place: New York. A slightly different ode to the city than the ones Paul Auster usually practices, but an ode nonetheless – ode to permanent transformation, to the city’s ever-changing face and to the lives that feed it every day. Throughout the stories we encounter the same character types: a man (Simon in all 3), a woman (Catherine, Cat and Catareen) and a little boy (Lucas, Luke and Luke ), all caught in a never-ending cycle of destruction, loss, hardship and alienation.

In the machine – the first story has a 13-year-old boy at its center: Lucas. He takes his brother’s (Simon) place at the factory, after the machine caught and mauled his brother to death, thus becoming the sole breadwinner of the family. At the same time, he tries to protect his brother’s fiancée, Catherine, on whom he’s always had a crush and, though the unwillingly spouts verses from Walt Whitman, he does see a deeper meaning in them; he understands that despite the conditions he lives in, there still is great beauty in the world. In the end he saves Catherine from a fire at the company where she worked, but only by paying the ultimate price. This rising industrial backdrop reminded me of a Jack London story I once read and which, at the time (I must have been 12) impressed me a lot. Wonder what it was called….

In The children’s crusade Cat is a member of a police taskforce who receives calls from all the „loonies” who threaten to kill or blow people up and whose job is to identify what is worth investigating. When she misinterprets a phone call from a child, a bomb explodes somewhere in the city, killing a man. Before they can get to the bottom of it all, a second phone call is followed by a second bomb. The little terrorists quote Walt Whitman, justifying their actions by saying that they will return the world to a previous order. The third child comes to kill Cat, but he is not as convinced of his mission and she ends up taking him in. Not wishing to see him handed to the authorities, she runs away from her job and too-good-to-be-true boyfriend and takes the child to start a new life. Since he has no name, he says he’d like to be called Luke, like Cat’s other (now dead) son.

In Like beauty Simon is a humanoid machine (like the Jude Law character in A.I.), Catareen is a lizard-like alien who has found refuge on Earth and Luke – the little boy they find while being on the run from the corporations that now control the west of the US. It a post nuclear future (Jericho?) but not only; it’s the age of a new type of racism, of new beings to discriminate against, a new age where a robot can have romantic feelings of an alien.

There are a lot of elements that go through these stories, uniting them closely: the characters reflecting one another, the buildings and their changing functions, events that are now history (in the second story the fire at the company where Catherine worked is mentioned; while in the third story we find that the children’s crusade was a nation wide event) and, of course, Gaya’s store and the mysterious white bowl that passes through all the characters’ hands like a mark of the damned.

On a side note, my favorite Scissor Sisters song (and when I say favorite I actually mean “the only one I remotely like”) was inspired by the book, because the lead singer is a fan. It’s called Other Side (and the Doctor Who clip is the only one I found).

November 7, 2009

 For the first time in the history of Red Hen, I decided not to do all the programming for the series by myself this year and it was a joy.  We had a committee meeting with Lynne Thompson, Beverly LaFontaine, Jenny Factor, Dana Goodyear, and we met at Beverly’s house, she had yummy snacks and Steph Opitz was with us and it was great!  I came away with so many ideas I would not have thought of myself.  I don’t know why the committee was all women, that was kind of funny, it just happened that way.  Maybe next time we’ll allow a man or two?  But the great thing with women, as Deborah Tannen will tell you is we all listen to each other!  Great ideas of upcoming poets and fiction writers, science writers.  Eliza Griswold, Karen Armstron, Terrence Hayes, Amy Gerstler, Rita Dove, more Alicia Ostriker, Michael Cunningham, Malcom Gladwell, Jonathan Keats, Maile Malloy, all kinds of ideas… we were swarming with ideas, like the room was full of dragon flies.  I’m never going to program for eight series alone again, this was a party, it’s very hard to have a party all by yourself.  I have tried.

Tematrion handlar om film och jag gör det enkelt för mig genom att fokusera på filmer som är lika bra eller bättre än boken. Alltså där filmen är ett eget verk med konstnärligt värde.

1. Virgin suicides. Sofia Coppolas debutfilm, på Jeffrey Eugenides roman.

2. Harry Potter. JK Rowlings skrev, regissörerna har varit olika.

3. The Hours. Filmen med Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore och Meryl Streep är fantastisk. Michael Cunningham skrev boken, Virginia Woolf skrev Mrs Dalloway.

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Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om bok blir film, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sofia Coppola, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, The Hours, Michael Cunningham, Harry Potter, Sirus Black, Gary Oldman, Daniel Radcliffe, Mrs Dalloway, meta, Virginia Woolf, J K Rowlings, Virgin suicides

Michael Cunningham, on reading Virginia Woolf for the first time at 15:

“I was ready, however– or maybe I should say I was ready to be ready– for Woolf’s sentences. I had not only never seen language like that; nothing I’d read had prepared me for the fact that a human being could do what she had done, line by line, using the same ink and paper available to anybody. I had neither read nor conceived of sentences that complex and muscular and precise and beautiful.

It may, perversely, have helped that I didn’t quite understand what the sentences actually meant. It may have helped free me to better appreciate their tones and variations, the sheer virtuosity of their structures and sounds.

I remember thinking, Hey, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. Riffing, that is, as only a genius can; finding over and over again an exquisite balance between recklessness and control, between chaos and pattern.”

-From Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, (Free Press) edited by Elizabeth Benedict.

Henry Ebel, ashamed of his goggle-eyed father and driven, frustrated mother and their humble uniform store, attends Columbia College just 40 blocks south of their Washington Heights apartment but prefers to pretend they don’t exist.  Henry is not the only German Jewish émigré at Columbia, but he acquires an Anglophile demeanor, a wardrobe of cardigans and tennis sweaters, and spends holidays and weekends with friends’ families.  When dating my mother, he doesn’t make family introductions. It isn’t until Henry graduates with high honors and departs for Cambridge University on a prestigious Kellett Fellowship that Anna and Richard Ebel invite my mother out to lunch.  My mother, overcome with nervousness and exhorted by her mother to never cost other people money, orders only coffee.  “You’re a cheap date,” my grandfather says to her, hurting her feelings and leaving a scar.

My mother joins my father at Cambridge and they are married there in 1959, both 21 years old.  They return to the States a few years later, and, after considerable and tense negotiations, a nervous trip is made to Bloomfield, New Jersey, where my grandparents have since moved to the Troy Towers, a brick apartment complex surrounded by trim landscaping.  Henry dons his best wool suit in a chocolate brown.  He has been utterly out of touch with his parents, and returns to them a married man.  When Anna lays eyes on her son, the first thing she does is stretch out her arm to cleanly snip a loose thread from his lapel with her manicured fingernails.

When my parents are divorced, the custody agreement simmers.  “Your father and your grandmother’s relationship was strained,” my mother says, “but they both had a unique ability to create an environment of looming threat.  I was frightened that they would take you away.”

“Did you consult a family court attorney?  A hottie in a shag haircut, perhaps?  Now that would’ve been a promising husband number two.”

“I don’t think so.  I don’t remember.  I was frightened.”

“You were disempowered.”

“Yes.  Disempowered and scared out of my mind.”

“So did Anna disown me because you wouldn’t grant her partial custody?”

“Maybe, but it wasn’t like that.  There wasn’t a moment.  It just…happened, I think.  After the divorce, I don’t remember ever seeing Anna again.  She wasn’t a doting grandmother, you know.  She wasn’t the sort to take a child to the park or anything like that.”

“But were there arguments about money?”  My brother Adam tells me that when he was growing up, Henry regularly railed against his mother’s money manipulations.  It’s a classic, isn’t it, the confusion of money with love.  Would’ve been different, figuring out how to pay for college, if my grandmother had gone the other way. Lavishing me with riches as a way into my life instead of withholding them as punishment.  Not that there were riches, exactly, I mean, I don’t think there were riches.  My grandmother was the sole heir to some sort of moderate fortune left by a bachelor uncle, but also he wasn’t Vincent Astor.

“I don’t remember any arguments, per se,” my mother says.  “I remember that she once took you to FAO Schwarz to get you whatever you wanted, and when you asked for a stuffed animal she wouldn’t let you have one.  I remember you were terribly upset about that.”

(For more on the Whole FAO Schwarz Debacle, see No.4: False Translations.  Spoiler alert!  My grandmother buys me my first typewriter.)

But what I am looking for is a dramatic proclamation.  The flourish of a feather pen and its life-altering scratches across parchment.  Or a Dickensian slam of a rubber stamp as a last will and testament lands in the beleaguered clerk’s in-box.  Even a thuggy Italian attorney cornering my young mother in a Grand Union parking lot: that could work.  Something that remotely resembles the seeming melodrama of being cut off.  So let’s see what we can do here.

In the Stephen Daldry-directed screen adaptation of Fatherland, screenplay rewritten by both Michael Cunningham and Nora Ephron, yet I share credit, two scenes satisfyingly depict my dramatic disinheritance.

The first scene is set in a spotless upholstered living room in Troy Towers, an exterior shot of which reveals a circular driveway dotted with circa 1970 Buicks and Oldsmobiles in shades of Tiffany blue and pistachio.  Anna Ebel, (Lorraine Bracco in an impeccably fitted champagne blonde wig), has summoned my mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal) to a conference.  “I understand your intention is to divorce my son,” Anna accuses matter-of-factly, setting a coffee service down on the kidney-shaped coffee table as Maggie perches nervously in a tweed mini-dress jumper at the edge of the avocado sectional and a toddler Kathy, played by sedated twins from Tarzana, dutifully piles blocks in the corner.  Anna pours coffee, serves almond cake, and presents my mother with a Faustian opportunity.  “You’re not what one would describe as a confident mother, my darling,” Anna begins in her clipped accent, “and so I’m sure you will agree it is best, best for the child, if I remain involved, financially and otherwise.”

The next scene takes place in the dusty, downtown Manhattan office of a well-meaning but fidgety family court attorney (Chris Messina in a loosened knit tie doing his best young Dustin Hoffman), as the results of my mother’s refusal to grant Anna custodial rights are revealed: I have been written out of a sizeable family trust, if my mother would please sign on the dotted line.

“But I think Anna used to send me birthday cards, didn’t she?” I ask my mother.  We are side by side on the sofa of her Brooklyn Heights apartment.

“Wait,” says my mother, raising her hand to her mouth.  “I think I’ve just remembered something.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Checks.  I think she sent you checks in those cards.”

“I don’t remember those.”

“That’s because I sent them back.”

In the movie, Chris Messina wakes up on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s couch.  She’s sleeping curled around him. Groggily rubbing at his face, he sits, looking around the bohemian clutter of this Teaneck, New Jersey living room, has a half-hearted glance at the latest New York Review of Books, when he spots a pair of penetrating eyes staring at him.  A toddler girl in footsie pajamas.

“Hey,” he says, gentle and curious, wondering where his pants are.

“You’re not my Daddy,” the child replies.

I’m convinced that Provincetown is how the whole world would look if gay men were in the majority. No one uses a front door key, the front gardens are a riot of wisteria, and there’s a catwalk of a main thoroughfare with a lot of al fresco dining and small dogs. This outermost tip of Cape Cod in North America is artsy, cliquey, flirtatious and up for a good time. It’s free from corporate coffee chains and golden arches, but it does have a Marc Jacobs.

Michael Cunningham is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours and one of the town’s most high profile part time residents. I’m sitting with him on an idyllic July afternoon on the rear deck of his beach house in the east end. He’s taking time out from working on his Dusty Springfield screenplay, a project that he’s juggling with duties on a new novel. ‘This place is like high school but with all the horrors removed,’ he says. ‘It’s a high school that values eccentricity.’ Cunningham has been decamping from New York to P-town (as it’s commonly known) during the summer for years. He first came here, like many writers, to find solitude, but found something much more amongst its bohemian denizens. ‘This place feels profoundly like home, in a way I’ve not felt since I was a child,’ he says, before recalling one of the typically offbeat dinner parties he’s hosted, involving John Waters, Patty Hearst and the late Norman Mailer. ‘A mad tea party if you will – although Norman was entirely lovely and harmless in his dotage. It was difficult to imagine him throwing any of his wives out of windows.’

My visits to Provincetown over the past few years have been to spend time with one of my oldest friends, Elissa,  who has taken to summering here with her not-quite-urban family.  She spends her time gardening, beachcombing and taking pictures of the dunes and the abandoned airforce base in neighbouring Truro. ‘This is what we call the Secret City,’ she says, guiding me through the woods and gesturing to rows of spooky derelict cottages through the trees. The roads on which they stand are cracked with weeds, while iconic American fire hydrants rust on corners, on standby for a blaze that will never come.

From here we drive to Race Point to watch the sun set over the sea. Families are packing up their picnics on the soft sand while a few heads bob up and down in the scarlet-streaked azure waves. We watch a sea eagle swoop down and land on the shore before evening takes us away, past the drag queens outside the town hall flyering for the evening cabaret, to Whaler’s Wharf and to Ross’ Grill for filet mignon and Oregonian Pinot Noir.

This coastline has a rich pedigree in American visual arts – its dramatic Atlantic land- and seascapes and the much talked-of ‘Cape Light’ inspired Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper in their day, while the filmmaker John Waters lives from May to August in the house of Pat de Groot, who has spent her entire career painting the sea view from her balcony, each canvas radically different from the next by virtue of the light. ‘Sometimes, when the full moon is out, it’s like a Lichtenstein painting of a moon on water, or a calendar in a barber’s shop,’ says the cult filmmaker as we walk on the beach behind de Groot’s rambling grey-tiled house. ‘I sit on my balcony and I feel like I’m on a boat in a Fellini movie.’ Waters, who exhibits and sells his photographic work through the Albert Merola Gallery on Commercial Street, has been coming here on and off for 44 summers. ‘I lived with Mink Stole and Divine and we premiered my early moves, Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs, here. It’s always been bohemian and eccentric. People say it’s changed, but I feel like if I dropped a piece of paper out front at the end of one summer, it’d still be there when I get here the next spring.’ Waters is a fixture of P-town, and we’ve all seen him cycling determinedly, nay recklessly, down Commercial Street on his Pee Wee Herman boneshaker. Like a lot of [visiting] artists he uses his time here to work on new projects undisturbed, but he’s still a committed hedonist, and hosts frequent parties at Enzo’s restaurant in the west end of town. ‘Monday to Friday I get up at 6am and write, then I go for a swim at 1pm, go for a bike ride and then dinner. But on Friday night I go out partying. I’m a coal miner with a pay cheque.’

Every June, some of Hollywood’s more maverick power players arrive for the Provincetown International Film Festival. Last year Quentin Tarantino joined Waters and other P-towners at the event, which centred around makeshift screening rooms off Commercial Street and at a 1957 drive-in theatre in nearby Wellfleet. Now, I’d be hard pushed to think of a worse environment in which to catch all the subtle visual nuances of a movie, but the drive-in experience is a glorious overdose of retro Americana. I queue up with Elissa to pay for my random oddments of deep fried carbohydrate, grape soda and buttered popcorn and head back to her car, with its small pieces of driftwood and dried seaweed across the dashboard, remnants of afternoons spent doing not much at all along the Cape. As an eerie sea-mist rolls across the parking lot, I hang a knackered-looking ’50s metal speaker on the passenger seat window and try to make out Christian Bale in his Batsuit through the fog. I feel like I should have a quiff and a biker’s leather jacket.

Much of P-town is a New England timewarp, from the colourful saltwater-taffy shops near the pier, to the vintage bookshops and Adams Pharmacy, a 19^th century drugstore. This is where the pilgrims first landed, before moving on to Plymouth: in many ways it’s where America began, although that thin stretch of water between P-town and Boston is oceans wide in terms of lifestyle and politics. There’s nowhere else in the States where chic weekending New Yorkers holiday with families, bears, indie kids in drainpipe denim and the generally, certifiably, potty. At Herring Cove there’s the ‘boy beach’, then to the right of that the ‘girl beach’, then the ‘everybody beach’. It’s a Catholic mix, but the Pope wouldn’t approve.

I have a P-town friend, Nicole, who waitresses at the Beachcomber, a barefoot beach bar along the coast at Wellfleet that does a mean frozen margarita and attracts the kind of crowd that wouldn’t look out of place in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue – blonde, toned and shiny boys and girls. A US magazine recently voted it the ‘sexiest bar in America’. Nicole, who looks part Flemish Baroque Rubens and part Bruce Weber model, was interviewed for the Travel Channel after the story came out. ‘They asked me why I thought it was so sexy in here,’ she tells me as I squeeze lemon into my freshly-shucked oyster. ‘I said maybe it’s because people come in here not wearing many clothes.’

Despite what I’d assumed before first visiting P-town, this isn’t a place for nightlife. Everything shuts down at 1am, even if the party often continues outside Spiritus Pizza on the main drag. I don’t rate their pizza much, but the gossip and the flirting in the queue is first-rate. I sent a friend into the throng ahead of me one night for a slice of pepperoni and five minutes later saw him through the window, snogging the face off a stranger at the head of the queue. While there’s an enormous amount of fun to be had in the sillier bars along Commercial Street, I think the best of Provincetown is to be found in daylight hours – whale watching, climbing to the top of the Pilgrim Monument for views across both coastlines, or driving through the rosehip bushes and remote artists’ and writers’ shacks (one of them formerly Norman Mailer’s) across the sand in one of Art’s Dune Tours buggies. My favourite thing to do in P-town is simply to walk around and enjoy the colourful wooden architecture and the gardens full of curios that remind me so much of Dungeness in Kent – picket fences adorned with scavenged brightly-coloured bottles, weathered driftwood and fishing ephemera, all strung together like voodoo totems. There’s something of the spirit of the English seaside village in P-town, right down to the dips in the bracing Atlantic. With its distinct social seasons – wild and mobbed in summer and then desolate long before the first snowfall – it’s perhaps better to think of it as more of an underground Hamptons. If I didn’t know people here to stay with, I’d have to book a year ahead to get a summer rental, or six months in advance for a hotel room. Very few people stay after the season is over: even if the weather didn’t disintegrate, the people probably would. ‘In May, everyone’s thinking that they’ll fall in love or get rich,’ says John Waters as he straddles his bicycle, bound for Commercial Street. ‘In August they either did or they didn’t. And that’s when the melodrama happens. So it’s time to go. But of course, I still look forward to coming here every year.’

WHERE TO STAY

The Crowne Point Historic Inn & Spa, 82 Bradford Street, enq

508 487 2365; www.crownepointe.com. Doubles from £85.

The Red Inn, 15 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 7334; www.redinn.com. Doubles from £85.

Masthead Resort, 31-41 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 0523, capecodtravel.com/masthead. Doubles from £75

WHERE TO SHOP AND WHAT YOU SHOULD BUY

There are Provincetown-branded exclusive Marc bags and T-shirts amidst the thrifty accessories at Marc by Marc Jacobs, 184 Commercial Street, enq 487 0723.

The design store at the Schoolhouse Gallery (494 Commercial Street, enq 487 4800) has some unique jewellery and interior objects, rather like a mini MoMA.

Michael Cunningham hosted a Comme-style guerrilla store last year at MAP (141 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 4900), the coolest boutique in town. Shop for luxe denim, art books and meat cleaver silver jewellery.

Marine Specialities (235 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 1730) is a mad curio-packed must-see in its own right, selling everything from army surplus to diving suits and first class airline cabin condiment sets.

John Derian (Law Street, enq 508 487 1362) is the Massachusetts outpost of the New York decoupage king’s empire. Come for all kinds of glass interior pieces, adorned with antique paper imagery.

WHERE AND WHAT TO EAT

Breakfast, whether bircher muesli or a French toast binge, is as good as dinner at Edwige (333 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 2008) while the sushi at Saki at John Dough (258 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 7776) is as leftfield as the clientele – strawberry and mango top the salmon maki rolls.

The people-watching is on par with the lobster mac and cheese at Patio (328 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 4003), while Victor’s is one of the few dressy dinner places in town. Order the BBC oysters or deconstructed Ahi Tuna.

Ross’ Grill (237 Commercial Street, enq 508 487 8878) has the best red wine list in town to accompany its steaks, while the raw bar at the Wellfleet Beachcomber (1120 Cahoon Hollow Road, enq 508 349 6055) produces a fantastic sesame encrusted seared tuna, and the live music and bar scene makes it the best straight hang out on the Cape.