Bitting the Bullet

The Fifth Mountain

Paulo Coelho

I started the term searching for inspiration to cure my insipid attitude -- Where is that enthusiasm for learning that earned me an A in "Intro to Nueropsychology" this summer (which surprised me more than a little)?  So  I reread the very overdue library book that moved with me from Fairview, OR over a year ago.  It holds some great kernels that I wrote in my planner:

"If you have a past that dissatisfies you, forget it now.  Imagine a new story of your life, and believe in it.  Concentrate only on those moments in which you achieved what you desired, and this strength will help you to accomplish what you want." (180)

"Everything that could have happened but did not is carried away with the wind and leaves no trace.  Life is made of our attitudes. There are certain things we must live through -- the reason does not matter and there is no action we can take to make them pass us by." (183)

New age crap?  Maybe, but it seems more useful than the rhetoric of a depression that tries to hold me lately, as it so often does when the seasons change.   But I want to beat it, so (though exercise would be a better medicine), I read to try on the more useful thoughts of others.  The library (the one that should have sent me to collections over my lengthy borrowing of "The Fifth Mountain") has digital audio books to borrow (and I can even use my ought-to-be-outlawed number).  How wonderful is that?

The Fourth Hand

John Irving

Last week I devoured Irving's "The Fourth Hand" like the sugary confection it is; I love how hearing Irving stories makes me feel as though I'm talking to version of my grandfather who could 'descend' into topics like the meanings of television, violence, and sex in today's culture.  Yet, so much of this novel had that car wreck phenomenon.  More than once I wondered why I kept reading, caring as little as I did for the protagonist...but I couldn't quite put it down.  Wonderfully, Irving always seems to keep me wondering what will happen next, restoring a familiar element of curiosity that has been so absent from my countenance of late.  I did laugh a great deal, for which I wish I could thank the East-Coast writer personally.  Finishing it was mostly a relief, though it's probably the first Irving novel I've put down without ever having shed a tear.  That it was written in the author's spare time during the production of "Cider House Rules" made this easier to understand.  It's light & intellectual precisely because "Cider House" is so rich & emotional.

It's been pretty easy to let go of the faint puzzlement "The Fourth Hand" had inspired in me.  In the other three of his books that I had read, I felt the struggles of the protagonists and antagonists very personally, which was not the case with this reading. Probably because so many of Irving's opinions in "The Fourth Hand," such as the gratuitous violence on television news and the likely gratuitous sex in the lives of many who are rich and famous, are the same as my own.  The unoriginality of meeting in a hotel room for sex with a stranger.  The importance of "getting your life together," of feeling less "like a mess," of taking deliberate--instead of thoughtless--action. 

Until I Find You: A Novel

John Irving

I've just entered chapter six of "Until I Find You," and it has succeeded in interesting me like I cannot seem to get the rest of my life to interest me.  Funny, but well-documented, how people hit these emotional pot-holes after emotional high-points (like weddings).  I've discovered strange facts about tattooing & the memory of children, remembered how hard it is to let go of a romance when it has so obviously come to an end for that esential other-person who was once involved.  Felt lucky to have not had any children of my own (I do not plan to have any, for I don't think I'd be as good a full-time mom as I think any baby should have), though I miss one little boy I met during my romantic misadventures (in my earlier twenties) with a depth that I must be imagining.  There's no way I could have come to care about him so much as I feel that have after that long-ago year of weekends.  How much easier it is to observe and have a small amount of influence over the well-being of my step-daughter, than to wonder how that little boy is doing.  Hoping he is doing well seems to be the easiest way to quell such obviously-sentimental moments.  And so I wish him well.

Irving makes one great point about tattoos; how the things we humans memorialize on our skins are so repetitive. Broken hearts. Affection for our mothers. Names of those we expect(ed) to love forever.  What makes people think that they are so very different to one another when there is so much evidence (both ephemeral & genetic) to the contrary?

Minimalistic Advert

I couldn't help myself; the biggest treat I could think of after finishing the final for my Intro to Physiological Psychology was to see where Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz had taken the story of Mulder and Scully.  Nathan wanted to join me, so we saw the flick at a Sunday matinée (first time I've seen a show on opening weekend since, well, probably since we all went out to see Harry Potter together back in college!).

An early review from "Cinematical".

Perhaps because I was a fan who let the series go when Duchovny did, basically only tuning in again for the season & series finales after he left as a regular, I really enjoyed watching the leads negotiate the character-driven impediments to a romance that had only ever been implied between them before this film. 

I hate to give away too much, but, as I had imagined before sitting down in the cinema, the story is set in modern day.  It is six years since the series finale that saw the two agents leaving the FBI for good.  They have resumed their lives very much in keeping with their personalities; Scully attempting to give something back to an imperfect society and the powerless & impotent Mulder retreating into a hermit-like existence, his room papered with news clippings that seem to tell him "the truth" he looks for.  Much of the plot is engineered to subvert these opening portraits of the characters, to confuse who is doing what "right," a device that has always served the series well.
 
I was a perfectionistic high-school student with a 4.0 gpa when I became captivated by the relationship between these two fictional American workaholics, both named after baseball announcers.  Here was the intelligent & judgmental Dana Scully, trying to do "the right thing" yet also struggling with an uncertain faith in Catholicism.  And some-times beside her, the older and even-less stable personality of Fox Mulder, undeniably attractive in his burning curiosity about the heart of the mystery.  In reflection, I suppose I saw two routes for my intelligence (as I was so often informed that I had intelligence back then) to take, two kinds of people that I could become. I think I took the show as a way to learn what behaviors were and were not socially acceptable, and for a socially inept teenager it wasn't that bad a guide!  Though cynical & often frustrated with the dead-ends it entails, I've remained largely a Mulderist to this day.

As much as I enjoyed seeing the continuing evolution of the Mulder-Scully relationship, as well as the odes to various episodes that gave me wide grins as I recognized them, I have serious bones to pick with the writers about the film's demonization of gays and Russians.  While having a sex-offending ex-priest psychic was good for a few jokes upon introduction of the character, it made for a bleak connection to the perpetrators as the plot unrolled.  The stem-cell issue was a timely one to include, but it turned this film into a weird-science episode when it seems many (including Nathan and myself) would have preferred a story with fewer bodily fluids.

Still, I did leave the cinema quite pleased to have seen it; it felt almost like checking-in with an old friend you didn't mean to have neglected for such a long time.  What I have always enjoyed about the X-Files is the attempt that the writers almost always make to help the viewer find meaning in the events that occur.  This story certainly delivered on that, attempting to show how so many of the things that happen around and within humanity are ambiguous stimuli, ink-blots on the tapestry of our lives.  Powerfully, we get to choose what "it" means and how we reach to "it."