Calamitous Beginnings

I should first start out with an apology to my favorite son. He hadn’t seen teh blog yesterday and he called to check up on us last night (funny how just the sound of his or his sister’s voices lifts spirits). In accordance with yesterday’s joking post about the fictitious sink hole I reported the driveway calamity in semi-straightforward manner. This was difficult with my wife laughing next me. I felt bad because here’s a kid with a thousand things on his plate and he took time out to check in with his parents.

What My Son Imagined During Our Phone Call

Of course that did not stop me from following through with the joke. To his credit the engineer in him immediately started asking probing questions as the the dimensions of the disaster and recommended courses of action. I got the distinct impression he was ready to jump in his car to come down and help (sometimes kids just make you so damned proud). I told him to just see the blog for photos and he would understand. He apparently took the joke in stride because he commented, “Well played”, after reading it.

My wife and I watched a great movie last night, a Netflix arrival, Begin Again. I wasn’t sure how it got on my list but as we watched it I kept remarking to my wife that our daughter would love this movie. The film was the story of a British song writer, played by Keira Knightley, who’s abandoned in New York City and is accidently discovered by a seemingly has been, music producer played by Mark Ruffalo. It didn’t fall victim to the normal boy meets girl tired path but took some chances. The city itself should have received billing as a supporting actor.

There was a memorable scene where Knightly sings a song in kind of deadpan fashion which the audience almost completely ignores. We then see the song as Ruffalo imagines it with different accompanying instruments added and the song is transformed into something special. I love it when a movie genuinely surprises me and Begin Again surely did. I texted my daughter to ask if she’d seen it. I received a rather pointed reply that Begin Again was prominently featured on her list of best films of 2014, which explained how it ended up on my Netflix list in the first place. (One of the cool things about getting old is the blanket defense of an unreliable memory)

I’ve spent the last few weeks struggling to finish my latest book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. No, “struggling” is the wrong verb, “luxuriating” is more appropriate. Ms. Pessl’s prose is so dense in a thoroughly enjoyable manner requiring the reader to spend time with it or run the danger of missing some of the very insightful references or insights. I have a very bad habit of rushing through the books that I enjoy; a signature failure of my impatient nature.

Each paragraph of Pessl’s work is overflowing with description and whimsical (and very funny) images. When I first started reading this book I fell into my bad habit of speed reading but found I was constantly stopping and re-reading a paragraph because I’d missed some clever turn of point. I finally surrendered and just savored the journey. The book also manages to intertwine a very clever plot throughout the mass of dry humor. The story follows a precocious high school student through her senior year which would seem mundane until you enter the world of Blue van Meer. Take the chance that I did with this book (so far from my usual choices) and you’ll be in for a  real treat. I was sent down this path by yet another recommendation from the Cali-daughter, something of a theme recently.

Here are a couple passages from Special Topics in Calamity Physics to demonstrate what I’m trying to describe:

“The restaurant attempted, with the intensity of  any dedicated Emergency Medicine physician, to resuscitate Victorian England with a “heady culinary voyage that artfully blends The Old with The New” (See www.hyacinthterracewnc.net). Housed in a pristine green and pink Victorian house, the restaurant was perched on one side of Marengo Mountain and resembled a depressed Yellow-shouldered Amazon Parrot desperate to return to its natural habitat. Walking in, one could see no sprawling view of Stockton from the giant fan shaped windows, nothing but that notorious local fog frothing off the greasy chimneys of Horatio Mills, Gallway’s old paper mill twenty-seven miles east (now Parcel Supply Corp.), a haze with a fondness for hitching a ride on a recurring Westerly and smothering Stockton’s valley like a maudlin lover in a humid hug.”

Describing a librarian:  “Ms. Jessica Hambone, the librarian, who’d been married four times and resembled Joan Collins in her more recent years, had emerged from her office and was now standing at the Hambone Reserves Desk. Obviously, she’d intended to shut down the disturbance because shutting down disturbances, with the exception of fire drills and lunch, was the only reason Ms. Hambone ever emerged from her office, where she allegedly spent her day shopping www.QVC.com for Easter Limited-quantity Collectibles and Goddess Glamour Jewelry. But she wasn’t coming over to the scene with her arms in the air, her favorite words, “This is a library people, not a gym,” darting out of her mouth like Neon Tetra, her metallic green eye shadow (complementing her Enchanted Twilight Lever-back earrings, her Galaxy Dreamworld bracelet) reacting against the overhead fluorescent lights to give her that explicit Iguana Look for which she was famous. No, Ms. Hambone was speechless, hand pressed against her chest, her wide mouth, deeply lip-lined like the chalk outline of a body at a crime scene, curled into a soft, wisteria-fairy-pin of a smile.”