"Upstairs, Downstairs" completed its 3-episode mini-revival on 'GBH last night.

I missed the second episode so will have to catch up. All-in-all it was fun to see Rose, of course, and fun to watch the uppings & downings, to-ings & fro-ings of a "great" house, though not so great as in the Bellamys' day. But the last 20 minutes or so of the final episode seemed like just a whirlwind of sub-plot resolutions coming in hectic rapid fire, as if the producers & writers had in fact originally plotted out a full season of episodes, with proper sub-plotting, minor story arcs and character building stuff to support 8 or 10 or even 12 or 13 episodes, and then got cut back but didn't know how to prune properly, so had to wind everything up in 20 minutes. It felt like Luke Skywalker blasting through an asteroid field with all the loose ends roaring at you to be tied up. As much as I'd like to see "more, please" of this new incarnation of 165 Eaton Place, I think what I'd really like is to see a fast rewind so we could watch these various story arcs, characters, and subplots unfold at a reasonable pace. And THEN move on; I think Pritchard has possibilities (obviously he's no Hudson, but I can't imagine Hudson delivering his employer's baby, either), Agnes is completely missable, actually, and Hallam isn't much more exciting. The Materfamilias, predictably, since played by Eileen Atkins has the potential to be a driving force, and the budding friendship between Rose and the cook also has potential. Persephone was well-packed-off to Berlin, though clearly - should there be more - we have not heard the last of her, knowing as we do what's in store for these folks in the upcoming years. It was a fun show, and well worth doing, and sign me up for more, should it come along.

So I watched "Get Low" last night

and I admired it much. Duvall and Murray of course; splendid. Worth watching just to see Duvall grunting and crotcheting; it might have been worth watching just for the hearse, which was classic.

I did think there was a bit more "old fart business" in Felix's noises and caperings than was absolutely called for, and I did get a sense that Duvall wasn't completely comfortable with his concept of the character. I'm not sure why I felt that, but the speech at the actual funeral seemed to me a little contrived, a little rushed-through. I didn't feel any conflict at all in Felix's getting up in front of all those people and blurting out his story; the ease with which it came forth was inconsistent with the reluctance that had been portrayed, (indeed the reluctance & shame that had driven him to spend 40 years in solitary).

But (in the words of so many critics) "these are quibbles." It was, after all, a fable, and not intended (I reckon) to be a true-to-life, realistic retelling of the facts. I enjoyed it immensely.

A small, early morning blues

There's way too much to do
And I've used up all my spare time
In advance, making big piles out of small ones
Picking up & putting down
Making short stacks out of tall ones
Doing time in my own home
Nuns may fret not
But it seems to me
that even they can choose and be
mistaken

I figure that I might have - at the outside - 25 years, though

the likelihood of more than 20 in which I might be really productive is scant. So say 20 years, in which to do 60 or 65 years' worth of work. Clearly I can't get it all done, so I have to pick and choose, and that means I'll have to cull some stuff before it even gets to the idea stage. I guess I'll try to cull the bad stuff, which means that 20 years should be plenty of time.

Finished "Townie"

Glad I read it. It isn't a book I'd recommend for the writing, but it's not a book one wishes to read for style. I'm envious of the younger Dubus that he had as much from his father as he did. It took him forty years to learn it but he was very lucky indeed.

Well I'm 80% of the way through "Townie" which translates to about

280 pages (the Kindle doesn't have page numbers only locations & percent complete odometer). DubusIII has managed to get himself out of the bar fighter mode and into the story writer mode, and has just reached the point where "Pop" is mangled up on route 495. Here's what amazes me about this memoir so far. Dubus Junior ("Pop" the highly respected fiction writer, the "Writer's writer") has figured more & more over the course of the narrative, and that's understandable since a big chunk of most men's coming of age is coming to terms with our fathers - their absence, or shortcoming, or the pain their presence caused, how their presence or absence, words or silences drive us to be or not be certain things or ways. But here's the puzzlement: Dubus Junior ("pere" that is) is VERY clearly a latter-day Hemingway knockoff, what with the outback hats and the guns and the womanizing and the drinking and the general "true balls" ethic. But Himself ("Papa") has not been mentioned a single time, not as an influence on "Pop" personally nor as a writer, but the omission is glaring and can't help but be anything other than purposeful and intentional. I will not believe that the parallels aren't there, and haven't been noted. Artistically, I wouldn't put either of them in the same pew as Hemingway (and that's not disparagement, believe me). I just find it odd that such a GLARING parallel hasn't found its way into the narrative or ruminations thereon. Maybe AD fils doesn't know from "Papa" or else doesn't see him in "Pop." I dunno. Doesn't ring true there, somehow.

Dream Journal 4/6/11 - a fragment

It was my mother's place, but of course she's been dead for 20 years (she wasn't dead in the dream, but she was played by someone else, some old woman I've never seen before). And of course though the house was hers in the dream context it had nothing to do with any house I ever knew about that she lived in. But the main thing was there were hornets and bees ALL OVER the place, and I kept asking if there was hornet spray (very specifically "hornet spray" not "bug spray" or "insecticide" or "Flit") and she kept saying "I'll get some tomorrow" and I remember the dreaming me thinking "Tomorrow hell, I'm not sleeping in this place with all these frickin' bugs flying around" and then a pipe that ran up alongside the stairs from down somewhere started leaking water UP. And I saw that and thought "Wait a minute, how can that pipe leak UP?" and I woke up.

A random thought tripped over while cleaning up old files

From 18 January 2010
We are tools and dupes of the chemicals with which nature floods our bodies between the ages of eleven and thirty or so. At these ages our purpose in the Grand Scheme of Things is nothing more than to propagate the species. Most of us do this, or at least strive mightily so to do. We then spend the remainder of our primes nurturing and protecting the propagands, which mostly exhausts us.

I bought Andre Dubus III's "Townie" for my Kindle

(and why does that phrase always morph itself into "mein kindle" in my head?) and have been reading it diligently. Perhaps more diligently that some other things I've read so far on "my book." My initial attraction to the DubusIII memoir was a geographical & temporal connection: I lived in the places he lived & memoirizes about around roughly the same time he's talking about. I was a bit older so probably one of the stuffy adults who surrounded his adolescence, and he was one of the damn teenagers getting underfoot of my young adulthood. But the geographical connection is startling; my stomping grounds in Haverhill and Newburyport, at about the same times, were literally around the corner from the places he lived and acted out. Yet the culture he was in was contiguous to but not touching the one I lived in, even though, at many times, we were literally within arm's length of each other.

I'm undecided about the quality of the writing; for one thing there's a lot of repetition, of sense if not of precise examples and phrases. For another, there are many, many examples of very awkward phrasing and infelicitous imagery. So I'm dubious about DubusIII's basic literary talents and will have to read some fiction to get a better sense of it, but in this piece he is most certainly not a stylist, and even more certainly in need of a good editor.