Ascent, Descent

In the past two days, I've discovered that a person can get a lot of reading done in a hospital garden. Apart from quantities of birds and flowers, there are no distractions, and I relished the quiet, green space, four levels up from the ground. Behind me rose the Marriot Hotel, and around it, I imagined, surged the constant current of shoppers and tourists, but I saw and heard none of it as I sat reading in the garden.

Still, the hospital is no cheery place, certainly not when the fourth floor is also home to the children's ward. The novel kept my spirits elevated, and so did the memory of an animated short film that I saw over the weekend.

"La Maison en Petits Cubes" (The House of Small Cubes) by Kunio Kato, won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film last night. And it deserved to. Of the five nominated short films, I saw three. The Russian entry, "Lavatory Lovestory," was sweet and delightful, and "Oktapodi," cute and amusing. But it was the Japanese "La Maison en Petits Cubes" that took my breath away.

An old man lives in a tiny room that we soon realize is one of many that he has built throughout his life, each cube of a room resting atop the previous one. It's some time in the future, when most of the world is submerged and the sea level continues to rise. The short film doesn't dwell on this; instead, it reveals the stages of the man's life, the memories enclosed within each cube.

These 12 minutes of melancholic wonder remind me of Hayao Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky," particularly the apocalyptic motif of submerged worlds (on the island in the sky, the children find ponds with tiny buildings - whole worlds - within the waters). Japanese artist Inoue Naohisa's paintings also feature similar images. All three have different styles, but their creations suggest a distinctly Japanese sensibility, one that values nostalgia - not maudlin or mawkish but poetic and arresting in all its serenity.

The short film also reminded me of a young man in Argentina who told me he wanted to build his own house one day and live in it with the girl he loved, whoever she might be. I'd never met anyone who had a dream like this, certainly not in this day, and his declaration took me by surprise. And as I watched "La Maison en Petit Cubes," I remembered something else he had said - that he was wistful about much of his past but never regretful. Years from now, if we're still friends, I hope he'll be telling me a story much like this one.

Now that it's quiet...

...I hear it again. The sound of what is real. Truth: I've heard it before, but on each occasion, forgot it too quickly. Again and again, it makes itself heard. A plaintive ringing in my ear. Very well then, I'll pay attention now. I will.

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" by Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be,

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Quiet, by Rachael Yamagata.

Death in love stories

Last week, The Writer's Almanac put up several love stories - fictional and real-life - in celebration of Valentine's Day, or what I'd like to call Day of the Dopamine Mother Lode, the day when the caudate nuclei in the brains of lovers collectively produce copious amounts of dopamine, the chemical that fuels romantic love. I'm tempted to write an entry on the brain in love, but perhaps another time. What I really want to write about is the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. I love The Great Gatsby but never read much about Fitzgerald's personal life. Little did I know that his own love story was a grand one too.

Here it is, from The Writer's Alamanc -

One of the most famous literary couples met in July of 1918, when a young lieutenant stationed in Alabama went to a dance at the Montgomery Country Club. There he met a Southern belle named Zelda Sayre. She had gray eyes and reddish-gold hair; she was spirited and independent, from a good family. And she liked the lieutenant, who was small, blond, and handsome, and whose name was Scott Fitzgerald. They fell in love.

But Zelda didn't want to commit to Scott. She had plenty of other suitors, and Scott had no money and no prospects. So Scott went back to his parents' house in St. Paul, Minnesota, determined to get a book published and win Zelda over. And he did. In September of 1919, the editor Maxwell Perkins convinced Scribner's to accept This Side of Paradise. When Fitzgerald found out, he proposed to Zelda, and she accepted.

For the next few months, they wrote letters, anticipating their wedding in April of 1920, just eight days after the publication of This Side of Paradise. Eighty-nine years ago, in February of 1920, Zelda wrote to Scott:

"Darling Heart, our fairy tale is almost ended, and we're going to marry and live happily ever afterward just like the princess in her tower who worried you so much — and made me so very cross by her constant recurrence — I'm so sorry for all the times I've been mean and hateful — for all the miserable minutes I've caused you when we could have been so happy. You deserve so much — so very much — I think our life together will be like these last four days — and I do want to marry you — even if you do think I "dread" it — I wish you hadn't said that — I'm not afraid of anything. To be afraid a person has either to be a coward or very great and big. I am neither. Besides, I know you can take much better care of me than I can, and I'll always be very, very happy with you — except sometimes when we engage in our weekly debates — and even then I rather enjoy myself."

They had a quiet wedding in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. Besides Scott and Zelda, the only people there were Zelda's three sisters and their husbands and a friend of Scott's from Princeton. It was a short service, and Scott and Zelda left for the Biltmore Hotel.

They became a mythic couple of the Jazz Age — beautiful and wild. They supported each other but also drove each other crazy. They were both jealous people and would do outrageous things to get each other's attention. And they both drank heavily. Zelda began to suffer nervous breakdowns and was in and out of hospitals, and Scott was an alcoholic. But they stayed together until Scott's death in 1940. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald died in 1947, in North Carolina, when the hospital she was staying at caught fire.

Love always ends in death, a literal one or the death of love. It's little wonder that many of the great love stories end tragically; sometimes they don't even have to be famous love stories - see DSD's post about the Museum of Broken Relationships. My favorite is a bottle opener in the shape of an antique key. Attached to it is a love story in four sentences -

You talked to me of love, gave me small gifts every day; this is just one of them. The key to the heart. You turned my head; you just did not want to sleep with me. I realized how much you loved me only after you died of AIDS.

I've often read and heard people say a part of them dies when love is done, or perishes with a loved one's death. Loss, longing, perhaps freedom too. If love sets you free, and death is a kind of release, then how apt that these two go hand-in-hand, though they aren't always the equivalent of each other.

One of my favorite poets, Donald Hall, writes of them as so. Love as death. Not the death that frees the spirit, but a brave death nonetheless. The kind that makes a person appear inexplicably foolish, but something to marvel at as well. He plunges ahead while the rest of us observe with fascination, safe in the spectators' stand - relieved even - but secretly envious.

"Love Poem" by Donald Hall

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

For Love One Can Die, by Ennio Morricone (performed by Triology)

A neighborhood milonga somewhere outside Buenos Aires. December, 2008.

I think I'd like to move to Salemi

A Korean immigrant's vast film collection, an Italian town, quirky people in charge. This article could have been the plot for a new Giuseppe Tornatore film, with a touch of "Be Kind Rewind" thrown in. But this is non-fiction, and some of the most fascinating I've come across this week.

A Korean immigrant in New York, Yongman Kim, started a video rental business in 1987, and over the years, he amassed some 55,000 films. But online DVD rentals meant that this amazing video store had to close, and Mr. Kim decided to release his entire collection to any person or institution if they agreed to these terms: keep it intact, keep it up to date, and make it accessible to members of his video shop and others.

No offer satisfied Mr. Kim until a town in Sicily, Salemi, stepped up.

And this is why I'd like to live in Salemi -

Last year, in a bizarre political manoeuvre, the ancient Sicilian town of Salemi had voted a dandyish art critic called Vittorio Sgarbi as its new mayor.

It was clear from the start that Mr Sgarbi would not be a conventional mayor, and he proved it by offering houses in the ancient but depressed town, heavily damaged by an earthquake in 1968, for sale at €1 each to owners who agreed to restore them. He also appointed a raft of unlikely people to municipal jobs: a Sicilian prince as head of town planning, an avant-garde Roman artist as "councillor for nothing", and his close friend, Oliviero Toscani, as councillor for creativity.

...

Last November, from his new "department for creativity", he launched a similar initiative, selecting 20 young artists from the island to join him in the town, providing them with food and lodging and little else and encouraging them to set their imaginations free. "We chose them for their talent and capacity," he said yesterday.

"It's an arts workshop. So far they've produced a manifesto on violence against women, projected a festival on human rights, designed a project on obesity, another on differentiated rubbish collection, another on illiteracy, a daily programme on the news for a TV music channel. We're working on a four-page newspaper which will be offered as an insert to national papers; maybe The Independent would be interested?"

And the video collection? One of Mr Toscani's many plans include the "Never-ending festival," a 24-hour projection of several films simultaneously. The festival would last 11 years.

There's something very irresistible about living in a town led by a mayor with wild - infectiously wild - ideas. And that the town happens to be in Italy...well, it couldn't have worked out better.

Visit To The Cinema, by Ennio Morricone (from Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso")
Gelsomina, by Nino Rota (from Fellini's "La Strada", performed by Quadro Nuevo)

Last Goodbyes

It seems like everyone's talking about the film, "He's Just Not That Into You." There's even a debate going on at Salon.com. Is the six-word phrase (makes for a six-word memoir too, as DSD observed!) a disparaging remark that implies a woman's inability to comprehend the actions of men? Or does it applaud her smart decision to admit the truth and move on to someone else, someone who actually *is* into her? Are those six words empowering or insulting?

Even Scarlett Johansson's cover of Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" - featured on the soundtrack - provokes argument. Still, the words echo the film's stories of people coming together and apart. Scarlett hasn't quite won me over with her debut album of Tom Waits covers, but I'll confess this song is getting under my skin.

Last Goodbye, by Scarlett Johansson
Last Goodbye, by Jeff Buckley

Remembering an enchanted evening

A friend mentioned this song a while ago, reminding me how special it is. Once upon a time or somewhere among the days that have yet to pass, we all have our enchanted evenings.

"Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger.
You may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know,
You know even then
That somewhere you'll see him
Again and again."

Some Enchanted Evening, by Jo Stafford

This is how my brain feels

I wish the days wouldn't run so quickly. I wish there weren't so many things to process and interpret and understand. But while time's quicksilver quality leaves me grasping for things that slip from my fingers and feeling doubtful, bewildered, and pensive, it also brings my recess week closer. When the end of February arrives, I will be free, for a time.

Bach's Prelude & Fugue #2 In C Minor (from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1), by Sviatoslav Richter

La Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. December 2008.

"The End and the Beginning"

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

~ by Wislawa Szymborska (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

A meeting of two geeks

It was a fortuitous encounter - a meeting of two very cute and unapologetic geeks on DSD's birthday last November. I'd like to say I knew right away that there was something there. Of course, it wasn't too hard to tell when they started conversing and got along like a house on fire. Whether it was about INSEAD (he's an alumnus, she's a student there now), iPhone applications, or foot massages, their conversation kept them in a world of their own. The rest of us hung back while the two of them walked side by side at Robertson Quay.

I couldn't stop grinning that night, thinking about our Van meeting a kindred spirit.

I was gleeful again last night, when DSD and I received SMSes from Van Tan about RT - "It's official!"

Unlike our last orchestration - R (my brother) and S (DSD's buddy) out on a blind date - I had nothing to do with this and DSD didn't even know RT when he came with a friend to her birthday dinner. But I did take pictures.

Happy Days Are Here Again, by Maude Maggart