Any Tiffs at Breakfast?

It hardly ever happens that I read a book after seeing the movie. The last one, probably, was From Russia With Love or Dr. No. I have no problem seeing the movie after reading the book, but not the other way around. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because of the time investment: if you know the ending, investing 2 hours in seeing the movie still isn't so bad; spending a week or so reading a book I know whose ending I know - nah.



That might be one reason I haven't seen Breakfast at Tiffany's yet.

We rented Shopgirl some time ago; I had never heard of it, but it starred Clare Danes and Steve Martin, two of my favorite people (for different reasons), and we kind of like small movies. It was okay: entertaining, well acted, unpretentious.

So when a very thin book spine called "Shopgirl Steve Martin" from the Goodwill shelf, I was intrigued, since I had no idea it had been a book before it was a movie.

Well, I was kind of right. The theme seems to be the relation between high and low emotions: Does desire sully love? Is love somehow not as noble if it starts as desire? Can desire change as love enters into it? These are all apt, insightful questions, and Steve Martin addresses them most annoyingly.

He's written a 130 page book of stage directions. Maybe it's worse than that: at times, it seems he's working out the characters' backgrounds, motivations, etc in his mind, except he's writing it down and getting it published: "Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind . . . She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony." Okay, Steve, now you've got your main character straight in your mind - great!

If the TV watching and the romances came up again in the unraveling of the plot, fine. But they don't. And did I mention that the entire book -- every sentence - is written in the present tense? "Carter Dobbs walks her back to Nieman's . . . he gives her his card. . . As he turns away from her, she finally can name what disturbs her about him."

Stage directions.

You do get a nice sense of the characters and their dilemmas. But, if the book had been longer, I probably would have put it down as too annoying to sit through. See the movie -- it's good.

And by the way, Steve Martin may be a bad novelist, but he is still the funniest stand-up comedian of my lifetime.

Speaking of putting down, in the last few months I've given up on Rebecca, and on Ann Beattie's Picturing Will. Plus, Dame Agatha has disappointed me lately (noted elsewhere). So I was starting to fear I was getting an aversion to female writers, until a fotunate thing happened: Goodwill had The Bell Jar. I read the first page and was floored: did Sylvia Plath maintain this level? Can it possibly be this good?

Wizardry

I worked only 3.5 days New year's week due to doctor stuff, and not at all this week due to cataract surgery, so I've worked only 3.5 days since December 23rd. Seventeen days ago. Have I accomplished anything during this vacation? Does getting vastly improved vision count? Other than that: I've done a little work on a couple of stories, got one story up on Zoetrope, chanted more than usual, did a little research.

This may be boring you, but it's reminding me that I have to make better use of my time. Am I a writer, or a guy who says he's a writer and scribbles down just enough to have evidence?

New Year's resolution?

So I haven't actually read much -- I hope the bus company stayed solvent without my contribution -- but, having experienced the wizardry of modern medicine, I reminded that about a year and a half ago I jammed all 7 Harry Potter books into my brain. Maybe that's when the cataracts developed.

Suffice it to say that I read them all in a very short time, consecutively, and couldn't imagine having to wait a year or more between books (as most people did). I teared up at Dobby's fate. I kept changing my mind about Snape, and found the conclusion entirely satisfying.

Yeah, I got hooked, early and hard. You don't need me to tell you that the Harry Potter books are very, very good. So, I'll tell you the two things that were bad.

I only mention these because they weren't necessary -- just gratuitous screw-ups.

One: the big teen angst in Book 1 is the rivalry between houses, and Harry's house wins because Dumbledore just keep giving it points until it does. Why not just have them win? Or, why not just have Dubledore announce that he wants Griffindor to win and have done with it? Because, obviously, that's exactly what he wants.

Next big flaw is at the end of Book 7. Ginny's mom jumps into the fray at the most dangerous moment and says "Not my daughter!' In real life, she would have been blasted while she was talking. Very dramatic, but stupid.

Geez, am I nitpicking or what???

I'm currently reading Steve Martin's Shopgirl. When I get around to reviewing that one, I'll try to find two good things to highlight.