Notes from a Summer Afternoon
It's no longer as beastly outside as it was a few days ago, but it's still pretty canicular. I let little household tasks pile up, unwilling to spend even a minute doing something sweat-making instead of sitting beside a fan. The apartment feels a bit airless, so I for one am hoping for a downpour tonight or tomorrow: I'll open the windows and let in some fresh nitrogen.
It was bearable enough to walk to McDonald's for a weekly fix, the real objective being to visit the Video Room a few doors further down Third Avenue and pick something to watch while doing the ironing. Much as I love being thought of as a perfectly idle, meditative sort, I have to tell you that the pillowcase stuffed with damp napkins and handkerchiefs has been bothering me since Saturday, when I got Kathleen to run them through the wash. So to bribe myself into making it go away, I rented A Cock and Bull Story, Michael Winterbottom's fantasia on themes from Tristram Shandy. This was my introduction to the amazing talent of Steve Coogan - shame on you for not telling me about him. Certainly no more apt novel could be chosen as the base for a movie about making movies; as it's fashionable to say these days, Tristram Shandy is the first post-modern novel. Making a movie is just about as non-linear as Sterne's digressive novel, and no one knows what the finished product will look like. (Not that I know what I'm talking about here.) Gillian Anderson is particularly fetching, both in costume and in mufti - I'd have been happy to see more of her.
I saved the ironing for the next feature, A Good Woman, a used copy of which I bought, sight unseen. How bad could a snazzy adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan, with Helen Hunt, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Wilkinson be? I can imagine that not everyone is going to love the American actresses playing mother and daughter, but I'm a big fan of Helen Hunt's sharpness, and Scarlett Johansson is a guilty pleasure. A Good Woman is studded, of course, with plenty of Oscar Wilde's best aphorisms, such as Mrs Erlynne's observation that when most people speak of "an experience," they're really talking about "a mistake." (The line is actually Cecil Graham's in the play: "Experience is the name Tuppy gives to his mistakes.")
There was still plenty of ironing when A Good Woman ended, so I cracked open the DVD, newly received, of Series II of Mapp and Lucia. This is weaker than the first series, but still great fun, and of course it's almost unbearable to watch Mapp and Major Benjy enjoy married bliss.
