First Day of Autumn

This month we had one crazy torrential night and day of rain, complete with thunder, lightening, and blissful drenching. Now it's back to the dry days of the golden hillsides.

Today is the first day of autumn. They promised us awful heatwaves for yesterday and today, days of torrid heat which have not materialized, but which have managed to keep me from walking to work, and to keep me in a semi-sedentary stupor. I've been watching a lot of movies.

Autumn Leaves (1956, dir. Robert Aldrich) with Joan Crawford, Cliff Robertson, Vera Miles & Lorne Greene. Joan plays an

unmarried middle-aged woman who makes a living typing up copies of manuscripts. She is composed, intelligent and self-sufficient. Along comes dashing, passionate, 20-something Cliff, who sweeps her off her feet, against her better judgement. Both of their performances are beautiful and believable and the plot is very compelling and ultimately satisfying. Alongside the themes of fall-spring marriage and family betrayal there is a description of American mental health policy in the 1950s. It was apparently quite easy to have someone committed, and while mental health professionals felt more empowered than ever with new perspectives, pharmaceuticals and techniques, it is not clear from the treatments shown in the film that these treatments would ultimately cure anyone.

This film doesn't insult your intelligence by telling you what you should feel. It lets the characters' understanding of the truth and each other evolve with the story. The emotional lives of others are indeed cryptic, foreign things which we should not assume we understand. Even so, with patience, courage, dedication and sacrifice, even the most seemingly unreasonable situations might be salvaged - or so this film seems to say. Knowing a couple of women in very suboptimal emotional relationships where they are constantly hoping to change their abusive partners, I am less convinced of this.

Madame Bovary

This DVR feature of cable television is great. We can record any movies or programs we'd like to watch at our convenience. The Turner Classic Movies channel is one of my favorites. Over the past few months I have watched lots of wonderful movies like The African Queen, Spellbound, Jezebel, A Woman's Face and more.

Lately I have been watching a film version of Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary with James Mason as Flaubert and Jennifer Jones as Madame Bovary. I remember reading the book when I was a teenager and feeling a lot of sympathy for Madame Bovary. She was trapped, yearning for freedom, full of dreams of self-fulfillment and social climbing. While social-climbing wasn't in my goal set, as most teenagers, I yearned for freedom. Since my family had self-destructed as a result of what I thought must have been unfulfilled yearnings and ambitions, somehow I must have considered this all very expected and even acceptable. Flaubert tries to portray Madame Bovary as sympathetic, but I remember also thinking of her as selfish. Watching the movie today she just seems selfish and narcissistic. I find myself wondering about the etiology of that sort of narcissism. Is it undeveloped mirror neurons? Is it being spoiled as a child? Is it associating with selfish role models? I'm not sure.

My Life Story

My life has been a relatively strange one, full of identity shifts and odd relationships. People tell me that I should write my "Life Story". Sofie says, "Don't do it. Let someone else make the movie." Now I am learning a new web technology, Joomla, which is a content management and delivery system for the web. Maybe creating a site telling my life story on there would be a good way to do it. I would include code so that none of the pages would be spidered and then some clues places if anyone needed to find it. That's one idea. Oh, I'm full of ideas, I am.

The reason this came to mind is that yesterday I was reading a review about Michel de Montaigne in The New Yorker. It said that one day, at age 38, he just turned his back on everything and spent the rest of his life in his office with his books writing about everything that came to his mind, for himself. Much of his work is introspective, and he noted how fluid human opinion is, how fickle our attitudes, how malleable our outlook. It reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in which the protagonist offers all these pithy, passionate, authoritative declarations on the nature of man, woman, humanity - declarations which sometimes contradict one another depending on how his life is going.

Coyote alarm clock

This time of year we're woken at night by sudden howls and syncopated shrieks. The hills are dry and the coyotes have come down to rest by the creek. They must sleep by day or they're drowned out by the cars. It's at night that we hear them screeching to the stars. Early on, like eight or nine a siren might set them off. Just what does it at 2 am, I couldn't say. There must be a whole den of pups - I hear them whining, piteously crying, sometimes one by one, sometimes sad in unison. They sound sad and lonely and hungry.

There were some nice, fat quail in the yard today. The coyotes haven't hunted them all down. Let the rain come soon so the coyotes can go crawl back up into the hills.

Blackberries on the way from school

On the way home from school I like to nibble on the blackberry bush by Juvenile Hall. I always feel like some she-bear foraging when I do it. At 1:30 in the afternoon the sun is hitting all the vines and the berries are oh-so-sweet. Such a lovely home-walk treat.

September - Applemoon and Pear

That evil, incompetent old fake landscaper lady wounded our apple tree. There are a few sorry, undersized Gravensteins hanging there but the trunk is all ravaged, the leaves prematurely shrivelled and falling. I wonder if it will make it through the winter. Good thing it had a child on the other side of the fence. Maybe it will make apples next year. Maybe its roots will uproot the new fence. It is awfully close.

The 5-in-one pear, which at this point is a 3-in-one if we're lucky, is faring better. There is a bevy of Boscs, a few Poir William and I think a branchlet of those red pears. They should be ready to harvest soon. This summer was cool though and the watering situation erratic. I might make syrups or sugared liquors from them. I don't think they'll do well for schnapps.