Julie & Julia: savouring the nuances of life

I went to see Julie & Julia. It is a wonderful movie! I found it refreshing and original and of course, about two of my favourite topics: food & France

Of course on a deeper level, this movie was not just about food & France. Honestly, it resonated with me, and I would guess many other women, on different levels.

First I think it aptly describes some of the essential dilemmas of women's lives:

-Where are we to put our energy?

-How are we to maintain balance, within our own selves and outwardly in our lives, our careers, our relationships?

-How are we to find and make meaning?

-Who are our models and where is our support?

J&J each struggled with the core question of where to put their energy, and they both stumbled upon it by the simplest method: they made a conscious decision to do what they loved to do, regardless of the outcome. On a subtler lever this meant trusting that this simple connection to the outside world meant something important. That it was worth honouring, and in doing so each woman honours her self.

About balance: this has to be the biggest issue that I see with my women friends and my own life. J&J reminds the viewer to savour the sensory experiences of her own life, literally through food, but also by enjoying her relationship to her self as much as the relationships with those whom she loves. It is about balancing the inner life with the outer life. To let go of "doing" long enough to "be". How to live a subjective life, rather than being a mere observer of one's own life. J&J becomes essential advice for maintaining grace in difficult situations (read: how NOT to have meltdowns-advice I could have used in my twenties!). It is also about not being stuck "in your head" and learning to rely on other more "feminine" senses-intuitive, emotive, sensory-to guide us in our choices.

I loved each woman's relationship to her husband in the movie. Their husbands were their centre beam in their "house", their main support. Not because they were weak women, but the opposite. These men kept them "real" by encouraging them to listen to and trust their own, inner voice.

Another source of strength for the J&J characters in the movie were other women as role-models. Today we are so fortunate to have so many great women to look up to: women like Julia Child, who were leaders even in the most domestic of ways. Amelia Earhart, in a more unconventional way, is another of those women. I look forward to the forthcoming movie starring Hilary Swank (though too bad about Richard Gere playing Putnam-that really sucks). Other personal heroines that I have mentally asked the question " what would she do in this situation?": Barbara Kingsolver. Beryl Markham (you must read her wonderful book: West with the Night). Grace Kelly. Meryl Streep. Coco Chanel. Murielle Guiliano. My Nana.

The one common denominator among these women: they knew themselves and were not afraid to be themselves.

It is particularly interesting to me that J&J found their liberation from convention in the most conventional of pursuits, the 50's housewife's domain: the kitchen. For many women the kitchen represents subservience, tedium, dependence and overwhelm.

I was a staunch feminist in University and I stayed away from the kitchen as much as possible in my newlywed days, and a lot of my women friends still don't cook anything (or at least anything from scratch). I can understand this position. It isn't political for most of them, it is personal and more often just practical.

For me however, I now love to cook. My biggest moment of growing from girl to woman came at the surrender to this fact. I love looking in a fridge that supposedly contains "nothing" and being able to use my creative flair for frugality and exposure to other cultures to create a nutritious and beautiful meal. Cooking to me is liberating, powerful and life-affirming

Another thing I personally loved about this movie was the ultimate aim of the two main woman: both J&J focussed around one goal: getting published. Getting published in a book, with a real publisher and all the symbolism and value in that from sharing knowledge and bettering the world, to being validated. The book represents la creme de la creme

Being published on the internet is not life affirming. It is a popularity frenzy and a trend, a "movie of the week". It is impermanent & disposable, more like a magazine.

Books are permanent. The publisher's responsibility as gatekeeper and protector of proper language are especially of value today, in light of the crap being "published" on the internet (including, some would argue, this very blog!)

I see this as another aspect how books are a tactile form of idea-sharing and they are one of the most beautiful achievements of human civilization. Julia Child's wonderful book Mastering the Art of French Cooking can probably be found if you google the recipes online (I don't want to try), but it is just not the same. An E-Book, even if the e-version is available on my IPhone with a full complement of do-dads, is not the same. Electronics will never be the same as as the beautiful smell, feel and weight (and cooking stains) of a properly bound, solid, printed book.

So although this movie appears to be about food I think it is really about about courage: allowing one's self to be really out there in the world, living with passion and making the most of one's life within the limits we are given. And sometimes that looks pretty domestic, and I applaud this movie for being completely unapologetic for that.

So now I have ordered a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (sheep that I am) because I have to try that amazing Boeuf Bourguignon recipe, Julie and Julia's first, and soon, hopefully, to be my new specialty

Hemingway's grandson re-edits A Moveable Feat

See the article here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/30/hemingway-grandson-moveable-feast

Storybook Theatre: The Three Musketeers

RE: The Three Musketeers

Performed by Storybook Theatre as part of their Adventures in Theatre series 

For kids aged 6-12 to 100

Do you remember going to the theatre as a kid? I remember when my mom would take me to the Young People's Theatre in Toronto and it was an adventure. I remember none of the actual plays that I saw, but I DO remember that it was so much fun. It was truly interactive theatre. It was transporting  and transforming, and it was theatre celebrating the sheer joy of life.

Storybook Theatre in Calgary is like that. Their production of the Three Musketeers this past weekend at the Pumphouse Theatre downtown was a fantastic show. The lead male actors that played the rascally Musketeers (Porthos, Aramis and Athos) and especially the actor who played the lead d'Artagnan character (John Knight, pictured above), were natural and incredibly fun to watch. Their swordfighting skills, their group dynamics and evident mischievousness, and even the fit of their costumes contributed to theatre so believable that I was transported back to 1600s Paris and the feeling of looking into a secret world of the Kings guards. This is an amazing achievement considering that I was in a room full of cheering (and booing) kids that smelled a little like a stinky diaper. But no one cared about the smell (kind of like Paris back then). The performance of the actors was certainly beyond the scope of that stage and this little theatre-company-that-could. It was a big treat, indeed. It not only transported me to Paris it transported me into a younger version of myself for a few hours. And what a wonderful gift to the next generation of kids that will make up this community! No doubt, those kids carried the swordfights and bravery into their tufty beds and into their dreams that night. They were opened up to a world of possibility, of bravery, of honour and manhood. Now I will have to read the Dumas classics for myself and see if they hold up to this kids adaptation.

At the feet of the Gods: Paris as a reader

Last summer I visited Paris. My memories of those ten days are like cherished postcards from another life: Strolling hand in hand with my husband on the wide, neat, limestone avenues from the 1700's; resting on the lip of a marble fountain in the verdant Luxombourg Gardens; silently moving amongst the devout in the hushed and cavernous churches; drinking in the fragile beauty of the sun as it lights up the petals of the white lilies in the Jardins Des Plantes. With my feet complaining, I would take celebratory rest stops at little cafes, sitting face-out and watching the assortment of life stroll, ride and drive by my little window on the world, as I sipped thick & delicious cafe crèmes and savoured the fresh butter layers of air that are the Parisian croissants. I was deeply impressed with the history and the beauty that surrounded me, and the contradictions that exist simultaneously in this otherworld. 

One of the most impressive angles of Paris' beautiful face is the multi-layered literary world. This is her secret jewelry box to a fanatical reader like me. I walked dreamily (and somewhat disbelievingly) along her oldest streets and sponged up all that I could. I walked daily up the narrow Rue Mouffetard, a very old, narrow Roman road that climbs uphill in a bustling district. It narrowly escaped the blasting out of Baron Haussmann's redevelopment during the reign of Napoleon III. This was the area that I stayed in with my husband while in Paris. We rented a small run-down apartment (as the ad said, with a terrasse!) near the Pantheon on the Left Bank, so named for the leftist thinkers who jammed the cafes and lived in the tiny accommodations there. Like everywhere in Paris, this area was overloaded with interesting sites and smells and little plaques annotating the life of yet another famous writer who lived there. Literally every corner of Paris is stamped with the imprint of its writers and artists. Off the Rue Mouffetard was tiny Rue Rollin, a side street where Descartes lived. Only a humble plaque next a large, rustic door clued in the observer that this was his home. Another home on this tiny street was occupied by Pascal in the 1600s. Two doors down, another small plaque stated that the occupant  in this home, a professor, had been dragged forcibly by the Nazis to a death camp. Impossible to imagine those green-grey uniforms marching along the tiny streets of one of Paris' oldest and liveliest neighbourhoods. Hemingway wrote on the top floor of the apartment diagonally across the street, bordered by little awnings over cafes. George Orwell, Verlaine, James Joyce, Jean Valjean and Balzac all lived in this tiny district near the Place de la Contrascarpe.

Since entering this world of the ultimate immersive library, I have been reading books about Paris, set in Paris, written by ex-pats and Parisians’, and anything I can get my hands on about Paris. I read That Summer In Paris first, Morley Callaghan's detailed defense about his time spent in Paris as a young man in the 1920s when he was boxing with Hemingway and still chasing the elusive James Joyce, when he was poor enough to be dropping in on credit to Shakespeare and Company bookstore and spending hours strolling along the Seine. Morley was an amazing writer, deft and sure handed. I knew nothing about the drama between himself, Hem. and F. Scott Fitzgerald until reading this memoir. 

Simone de Beauvoir's ghost still lives in these Paris cobblestones and streets. Her famous romance with Jean Paul Sartre is evident around every corner in Paris, from her and Sartre's shared lonely grave in the cemetery of Montparnasse; their grave is covered with rocks, flowers and letters that are stacked precariously from grieving pilgims. There are statues and streets named in their honour, famous cafes where they worked. As a supposedly well-read traveler I felt unschooled. I hadn't yet not read any of Simone's work. I promised myself that as soon as I got home to Calgary I would read all I could.  I started with A Very Easy Death (Une Mort Tres Douce), a precisely written testimonial to her mother and her slow death. Her beautiful phrasing: “facing the black sun alone”, “living prattle at the bedside” and her unflinching description of the toll of illness on her mother’s body turned me into a follower overnight.  I also read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Second Sex. Her writing is dense and philosophical,  I had to re-reading passages to get the most out of her writing. Sometimes I found her direction difficult to follow. However, her influence is immense and her writing made me realize how infantile my own supposedly "enlightened" undergraduate eduction is in comparison: who am I but an auto-didactic, urban Canadian reader, with a shaky hold on existential philosophy and only a slightly firmer grounding in women's studies?

Next I was into Franz Fanon's classic, The Wretched of the Earth. Banned in bookstores in France upon publication, this was a vastly influential work and an interesting socio-politial document for me. It laid a path for the anti- Colonialist struggle, especially in Africa.

Next read was A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s fantastic memoir, written when he was across the street from our little apartment on Rue Mouffetard.  Hemingway wrote extensively and critically of my beloved Fitzgerald in this book. I was fascinated. I had always felt that reading a writer's words was the most intimate relationship someone could have with another person (beyond falling in love), but after reading Hem’s book I realized that reading an author’s work is only like looking at a writer through a pane of mirrors and stained glass, the very glass itself coloured by the writer’s past and his or her impression of himself. His alleged self.  In another way I suppose this is a kind of intimacy. Reading Hemingway's words on Fitzgerald gave me another view of the proverbial elephant in the dark room. Hemingway's tendancy to use language that is hard and perfunctory exaggerated his point. I think that Hem was very hard on Fitzgerald and I sense a contempt for Fitzgerald that is hardened into aggression and pride in some of his other work, like Old Man and the Sea and Death in the Afternoon.

“(Fitzgerald’s) talent was as natural as the pattern that was made on a butterfly’s wings. At one time, he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could remember when it had been effortless” A Moveable Feast

A lot of the decline of Fitzgerald, in Hemingway’s view, seemed to be the because of Scott's love and obsession with his wife Zelda. That Scott lost his way from his art. An interesting view of love, if my interpretation is correct, as Hem mentions no love of such magnitude in his own life. And I think this capability to lose himself to love is actually what made Scott such a beautiful writer. 

Next read: Me Talk Pretty One Day,  by David Sedaris, a hilarious and contemporary account of life in Normandy. Sedaris is smart and funny! A releif from all the author bashing that went on in the 1920's memoirs.

After that I went through a period of reading Nancy Mitford, the English socialite and social critic who lived in Paris. Something in Nancy connected with me on a level that surpassed class, temporal distance and geography. I read her biography first, oddly: Life in a Cold Climate. This book conveyed her charm and wit, her sweeping intellect and her strong individuality. It immediately convinced me to read her novels. I read Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate and found them witty and fun to read. But beneath all this cutting humour I could clearly see a lurking woman who was desperate to be swept off her feet.  It reminded me of myself and all the liberated women that I know, even now 40 years after the crescendo of the women's movement. My generation who, after coming home from our successful careers, managing our own bank accounts, scheduling in our gym and yoga retreats on our computers, after we pick up the kids from their play dates- if we were to pick up our diaries and confess our deepest secrets, we would not be so very different from poor, romantic, lonely Nancy, except we would probably know a lot less about politics and have less of a sense of humour.

In Nancy’s own  tightly written and cleverly plotted novel the Pursuit of Love, she writes as Fabrice “One’s emotions are intensified in Paris, one can be more happy, and also more unhappy here than in any other place”. With this little reference, she has captured something else I can relate to. In Paris I felt a happiness beyond all measure: free of petty worries, not oriented towards buying silly things and looking or acting a certain way as we often do at home in Canada, not caring about money or television or email, or even how much I was spending. It was refreshing to be relieved of the burden of hating our human development, I didn't see a single "power mall" to remind me of our wretched state of modern life. It was a relief to temporarily press the pause button on the guilt that I feel when I see us raping the environment to built yet another mindless, artless suburb. The only things I thought of in Paris were simple pleasures, and great ideas. Books, the role of the state & democracy; cheese, pastries, baguettes; Human rights, divine union, and wine (and scarves!). Being alive and human was the only real preoccupation. Instead of billboards and concrete and glass, endless mazes of identical boxes that we call homes, when I looked up in Paris, I saw keystones of limestone arches, enormous doorways to apartment courtyards that could accommodate a horse and carriage. I saw the gigantic and astoundingly beautifully symmetry that is La Tour Eiffel; stylishly designed art deco entranceways polished to a gleam; huge chestnut trees and pretty window boxes on every street; perfectly arched bridges with faces of gargoyles watching over the water. All the good that we as a species have contributed to our current world was at every turn. All this glorious light as humans. Paris was my city of light, it made holy all the things of my religion: the bounty of human ideas, the glory of nature, the beauty of simple pleasures. I spent ten days in the temple of my gods and it was a holy experience. 

I continue to read and have a few more books on my list: I am reading Memoirs of Montparnesse by John Glassco and Writers In Paris by David Burke. Also on my list is Time Went Softly There, a memoir about life at Shakespeare and Co. bookstore (a fantastic store, that I recommend to all readers), Samuel Beckett's novels, Les Miserables, A Sport and A Pastime, and the novels of Marcel Proust. An ongoing list of books relating to Paris is ever growing and the more I read, the more I need to read!

And, hopefully, at first opportunity, I shall return to my city of light to drink at the feet of my gods and go back to the best bookstore I have ever seen in my travels. And get a new scarf.