This & That: TV, Rooftop Bars, etc.

Some stuff:

Dollhouse News. Via Jen and Manuel I heard that Fox is going to renew Dollhouse for another 13 episode season.  So I headed over to Whedonesque where Joss himself posted a comment:

Any thread that contains both "Shpadoinkle" and "Yub Yub" is truly exciting. And anything that reunites me with my stunning cast and my crazy staff (or "room fulla Tophers", as I call them) is nothing short of a gift. Heady times, indeed. We're two weeks away from finishing "Cabin" and now it looks like no summer vacation after all. But oh, the terrible things my brain is brewing... Just wait. We'll make it worth it.
Thanks for hanging in.

Apparently all of us watching on Hulu counted!  Not to mention those who use DVRs.  ABC also renewed Castle which I've been watching on Monday nights.  I love Nathan Fillion so that's good news.  It's exactly the kind of mindless show that's perfect for a Monday night.  Now, if we could only have a sequel to Dr. Horrible ...

Some local news.  Last night I checked out the new Moonrise Hotel over on Delmar for the first time, starting with drinks on the Rooftop Terrace lounge and continuing into the inside bar at Eclipse (the restaurant there).  The hotel was packed, probably with folks in for the graduation at nearby Washington University.  The decor was pretty funky with stairs in the lobby that have each step lit up with a primary color light (I can't explain it better, check out the website).

It was not an easy location to get to, coming from Clayton on a Friday night with Highway 40 still closed.  But once I was there and over my commute-stress I enjoyed being on the rooftop.  And my mojito was excellent (although they don't have waiters and the bartender was slow as molasses).

It was an odd night to be at a rooftop bar because there was bad weather to the north and a tornado watch for the area.  But we figured there was no better place to watch for a tornado than on top of a building.  No, we never saw one.  Here's a photo:

When the weather did start turning rainy and windy we headed downstairs where we split some Salt & Pepper Fried Calamari with jalapeno garlic butter that was truly scrumptious.   It was so good we decided to stay for dinner (although we stayed in the bar and didn't move into the restaurant).  

I had Lobster Pot Pie, billed as brandied lobster cream, golden potatoes and english peas in a pastry.  Sounds yummy doesn't it?  But I thought it was a little disappointing - the pastry was a puff-type pastry shaped in the form of half-moons but the "stuff" wasn't inside the pastry, they just sat alongside.  That isn't pot pie, at least not my definition.  For dessert I wanted the Berry Shortcake Trifle (mixed berries layered with shortcake biscuits and creme chantilly) but they were out of it so, instead, I tried the Cointreau Cornmeal Pound Cake which looked like a wedge of my grandmother's corn bread (and tasted like it) with cointreau flavored cream on top and some cointreua soaked oranges.  I like cornbread ... but not for dessert. 

So, the food was a mixed experience.  But the late night menu looks good so maybe it would be a place to go after seeing a movie at the Tivoli or after an event at The Pageant next door (if I ever get to an event at The Pageant).  One big complaint from the folks who rode their bikes - there is no bike rack.  Unacceptable in an urban environment.  But the manager assured us that they were getting one and it would be some hip design.

Home Improvements.  I'm in the midst of home improvements and boy are those things expensive.  I just had the back steps leading up to my back door replaced.  They were old wooden steps that were painted white and were starting to rot away.  I had them replaced with steps made out of the composite material that you can just hose off and I think they look really nice.  I also had the area around my front door worked on.  I'm sure my neighbors are relieved to have a clean white sunburst over my door rather than the peeling one that was there for the last year.  Next we move on to the patio and finishing the backyard fence.  Then (finally) I can start doing something to the inside.  Then it will be time to move.  Kidding.  But isn't that what always happens?

People of the Book

One of my reading groups chose Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book to discuss this month.   I forgot what we had chosen and only remembered to ask someone about a week before I was supposed to have read it.  I raced through it but  I finished it in time.

The novel is the story of people and of a book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.  Brooks tells the story of the people who created it and who saved it from destruction throughout the centuries sometimes at great cost to themselves.  The novel is divided between two stories.  One is the modern story of Hanna, a rare book specialist who is called to Sarajevo in the 1990's to conserve the book, which has been in a bank deposit box during the war and is now to be displayed.  This story takes place over the length of the novel but it is interrupted for brief stories about other persons who were important in the history of the book.   And each of these individual stories ties into something that Hanna found when conserving the book:  a fragment of a butterfly wing, a cat hair, a wine stain, etc.

There seemed to be a bit of disagreement in our group (I was in the kitchen making coffee so I missed most of it) between those who liked the modern story and those who liked the historical stories, but it didn't seem to be a big disagreement.   I thought that one of the saddest parts of the book was that we the reader completely "discovered" the history of the book but Hanna never did.  As in real life, she could only take the clues that she found in the physical book and try to learn from them the barest of detail about where the book had been. 

Each of us had our favorite parts of the historical sections.  Mine was the last section in which a slave in Moorish Spain creates the beautiful pictures to which text is later (in another story) added.  But many in my group thought that the story of the rabbi in Venice was the most poignant.   Interestingly we didn't spend much time talking about the political situation of Sarajevo, although that is a big part of the novel.

Because I read the novel so fast I missed a couple of connections.  The historical sections are told in reverse chronological order and often you discover in another section something that happens to a character you are reading about.   It was good to have a discussion and have people point out those instances.

The one thing we all agreed was that the author had Hanna jump too fast into her relationship with Karaman.  Maybe we're all too pragmatic to believe that people can meet each other and immediately feel that connection - other than, of course, lust.  I also thought that a few of the plot points made things just a little too easy.  For instance, the part in which Hanna just happens to join her mother in the city where her (unknown) father's family lives and then her mother gets into a car accident with Hanna's (unknown) grandmother.  I like the people in my novels to have to work toward discoveries, not have them thrown in their laps. 

I think that bothered me more than anyone else (I'm always more interested in structure than character).  We discussed whether the author just needed to keep the plot moving so that we could move on to the next historical section and everyone in the group seemed satisfied with that explanation.  Everyone except me.  Truthfully, I thought this novel would have been better if the author had decided on one story or the other.  Either a novel about Hanna that was fully developed or a huge historical novel that spans generations.   Again, I'm left to wonder why an author chose to tell such a big story in such a small book.  I would have liked a little more development.

Sister Francis Xavier

I just started reading the fifth (and last) book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.  It's called The Last Olympian and Riordan dedicated it as follows:

To Mrs. Pabst, my eighth grade English teacher, who started me on my journey as a writer

A couple of things struck me about that dedication.  First, that no matter how old you are the taboo against using a teacher's first name is hard to ignore.  I was at a meeting the other night and my 11th grade English teacher was part of the committee.  I usually end up calling her nothing because I can't bring myself to use her first name.  But, second, I thought this was a wonderful dedication and I hoped that Mrs. Pabst was still alive to appreciate it.

It made me think about my eighth grade English teacher, Sr. Francis Xavier, who is no longer alive.  She was a nun, a School Sister of Notre Dame, and she took no prisoners.  She wore a full habit even when the other nuns were moving to the short habits with the half veil.  During mass (which we went to every day) she would stalk up and down the aisles monitoring everyone (not just her class) and if she didn't feel we were singing the hymns loud enough she would hiss "ssssssing!" at us. 

She was also one of the best teachers I've had in my life. 

I had Sister for English from sixth through eighth grade.  Twice a week she would write the beginning of a sentence on the board and our homework assignment was to go home and write "a paragraph" using that as the opening.  For instance, she might write "Today, while I was brushing my teeth ..." and we would have to write something beginning with that phrase.

It wasn't really a paragraph, it was both sides of a sheet of paper (the special "control" paper that was assigned to sixth through eighth graders).  But she always referred to it as "a paragraph".  I think she was trying to make it seem as if it was not that big of a deal to write something.  You didn't have to write a whole story, just a paragraph.

The next day, before we turned in our work, she would look at her class roll and call out a name.  The lucky student would trudge to the front of the classroom, stand behind the podium and read his or her paragraph to the class.  Sister would say thank you and check his or her name off the list.  We would spend the entire class period listening to the work of our peers.  If you weren't called on during that class period you would be called on the next time.  Or the next.  We had forty-two kids in our classroom so you could never tell when you might be up again.   (Yes, forty-two).  And sometimes she'd cheat and call someone early, just to keep us on our toes.

We never earned anything other than a checkmark for our work, but the mere fact that we knew we could be called on to read our work out loud made everyone work hard to be somewhat entertaining.  You could tell if your classmates were impressed.  They nodded or laughed or occasionally gasped.   Usually Sister would just say thank you, but occasionally she would ask a question if the student had written about something factual or, if the student had written about something personal, she might express some appropriate emotion.  But mostly she just listened along with the rest of us.  If, however, the student used improper grammar (which of course happened often) she would stop him or her in mid-sentence and what followed was the equal of the Inquisition.  She didn't rest until everyone understood what was wrong with the sentence and how it was to be corrected.  But she did it all through questions and answers - law professors using the Socratic method could have learned a thing or two from Sister's technique. 

Reading paragraphs was two days out of our week.  Two other days were spent diagramming sentences.  She would write a sentence on the board, we would diagram it ourselves on our papers and then she would look at her class roll and call someone to the board to diagram it on the board.  if the student got lost she would look at the class and we would raise our hands to help out. 

Today, over at So Many Books, Stephanie comments upon an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that a professor at Trinity College is teaching a class on diagramming sentences because the students asked for it. 

They start off with easy sentences and build up to complex ones, their final assignment for the class asks them to diagram 120 lines of their favorite poem. The class also thrives on a little competition. At the end the 30 students are broken up into two teams. Each team has a week or two to write a sentence for the other team. Then on competition day the sentences are exchanged, the stop watch starts ticking and they have something like 40 minutes to diagram the sentence. The teams work at the same time each on their own blackboard. Each team starts off with 100 points and get deductions for errors. The team with the most points after deductions wins.

That sounds like something Sr. Francis Xavier would have liked.  She was a hard taskmaster and the class lived in fear of her but we learned from her.  Oh, did we learn.  The character that Meryl Streep played in the movie Doubt reminded me of her.  But, unlike that character, she was never the principal and I don't think she actually wanted to be the principal.  And it truly would have been a shame to remove her from the classroom.

I don't remember what we did on our fifth day in class.  I don't think there was a set regime, I think she mixed things up a little on those days.  I remember sometimes she would have us read things written by professionals and pull them apart.  Not for meaning but for grammar and structure.  (We had a different teacher, Mrs. Kearns, who taught "Reading" which was really the English literature class.)

Sr. Francis Xavier is long dead.  She taught me at the end of the baby boom when class sizes were enormous and when nuns were expected to "serve" without pay, just a convent to live in and food to eat.  Unlike the priests in the rectory, they cleaned their own homes and did their own grocery shopping and laundry.  And they did that after a long day teaching in classrooms crammed full of elementary school children .  Some of them were not very good teachers.  Some of them were not happy people.  Some of them were, frankly, downright mean.  But others, like Sr. Francis Xavier, were great teachers who were not appreciated nearly enough.  

I don't know if any of her students ever became a professional writer and dedicated anything to her.  But she certainly deserves such a dedication.

Undiscovered Country

I made my film debut in 1973 playing Queen Gertrude in William Shakespeare's Hamlet.  It was a made-for-TV production.  Well, ok ...it was a made-for-classroom-TV production. 

The producer, director and film editor was our local parish priest who owned a video camera in the days before the average person owned a video camera.  He made lots of movies with the parish.  He made a history of the parish (my dad was the narrator).  He worked with the 8th grade every year to make a stop-motion animation film (our year we did Casey at the Bat).  But his greatest achievement was Hamlet.  He asked the woman who coached 8th graders for the Speech League competition to help out and she did the casting and some of the coaching.  She cast me as the Queen.  My most vivid memory is when we filmed the big ending (where everyone dies) "on location" at the Grand Avenue water tower and drinking that poisoned cup and rolling down the concrete steps over and over for take after take.  Yawn. That's when I knew making movies wasn't for me. 

One reason I wanted to read Lin Enger's Undiscovered Country was because I knew it was based on Hamlet. But I wasn't sure how that was going to work for me.  Would knowing that it was based on such a well known play be a distraction?  How would he handle the idea of a ghost?  Was the main character really going to die?

I did find it a little distracting.  I never could completely lose myself in the tale, I was always wondering how he would fit the plot elements of Hamlet into this story set in the 20th century Minnesota north woods.  But the distraction wasn't enough to ruin it for me and, on the whole, I liked the novel.

He didn't shirk from putting in a ghost for one thing - a really disgusting ghost with his head half blown away (this father was killed while sitting in a deer stand; most people thought it was suicide).  And the mother (named Genevieve in this version) is involved with her brother-in-law.  But there are two boys, not just one.  And the Ophelia character doesn't go crazy. 

So there were some surprises.  And some red herrings.  The mother is a former community actress - I kept waiting for the play within a play to occur.

Enger writes beautifully.  Having spent a great deal of time in the north woods I could feel and smell the setting from his descriptions.  Jesse (the Hamlet character) is finely drawn and his grief is very believable, made more so by the fact that Jesse is the one who finds his father with his head blown away.  Enger's description of the aftermath of that moment is compelling.

His mother is also believable in an odd way.  He paints her as someone who suffers from depression and after the death she withdraws almost completely only coming alive when Uncle Clay is around.  It is almost as if Jesse has lost both parents, his mother is so far gone into her own depression.

I won't tell you how Enger ends the tale, but it is satisfying in itself and for fans of Hamlet.