Weekend Open Thread:
Rain
last Week at Portico: ¶ I loved it so much the first time, I took Kathleen to see it the very next day: in my humble opinion, Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal is the best film (so far) of 2009. I wish it had come out in January, because then I should have made the same statement, idiotic though it be to claim a best picture in the first month of the year, simply in honor of Pauline Kael’s 1978 choice of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In my humble opinion, Pauline Kael was visually tone-deaf, too political a mentality to discuss any branch of art. The damage wrought by her influence will take at least another ten years to purge. ¶ What did you make of Stephen O’Connor’s short story in this week’s New Yorker, “Ziggurat“? I got so little out of it that I probably ought to have remained silent; but I will say that I did not dislike it. ¶ Kate Christensen’s Trouble, her fifth novel, is definitely a book for the second read (just as The Proposal, like all of Hitchcock, is meant for the second viewing), which makes it difficult to talk about — it seems so much simpler than it is, and yet the anatomy of its artful composition would be worse than useless to first-time readers. So let me just give it a rave. ¶ My friend Vestal McIntyre’s Lake Overturn gets the best (highest-quality) review in this week’s Book Review, but, wouldn’t you know, it appears in one of those infernal roundups.
I have been trapped indoors more often than not of late. Today, as I hobbled forth for fresh fruit and other eatables, the gods smiled on me. As I turned south, the ominously dark and clouded sky was broken by low, broad horizontal shafts of an amazingly incarnadined golden light, which played across the west facing facades of the city. The slight turn of the street a few blocks to the south obliged the defiant light with additional surfaces upon which to play as the oblique faces of the buildings caught the light glancing off of the full-west facing walls.
As I turned east onto 14th Street, everyone walking toward me from the east was gilded, with the tower of Con Edison transformed to a pillar of fire above us all. Upon my return from a strangely empty Trader Joe’s, those coming toward me from the west were haloed by the light, the nimbus of canonization granting benediction to what is usually a no-nonsense stretch of the urban jungle. To match this canonical trasformation, the sky at the western, New Jersey, end of 14th Street was an amazing glare of red and gold smashing through the clouds; seeming nothing so much as an illusionist 17th century Roman church ceiling turned on its side transforming what usually lurks on the nether side of the lordly Hudson and the utilitarian buildings flanking the street on the city side of the river into an exquisite essay on Borromini.
As for those of us, and our loved ones, for whom the vagaries of weather can sometimes play emotional havoc, I say, be human: that is, apply the centuries-old remedies man has devised for dealing with situations not to his immediate liking. Nothing is more magical than the glitter of light manipulated by mirrors and reflective surfaces to enliven shadowed interiors; nothing more evocative than the warmth of a lit fireplace or the glow of candles or lamp light, casting pools of illumination as they simultaneously carve the shadows just beyond their reach; nothing more enveloping than the warmth of a cashmere throw as one nestles into an overstuffed sofa as the world beyond the window shivers in ice. Make lemonade of the lemons, that is the measure of humanity, and our handle on the divine.
In my family, weather angst may be gender specific. Non-seasonal atmospheric conditions can throw my wife into a deep depression -“it’s completely inappropriate this time of year”. My mom has a similar take often sending threatening letters to poor Al Roker. For me, weather is almost a non-factor, unless of course, I need to perform dangerous, outdoor electrical repairs.
Beautiful photo R.J. Thanks to you I know now very well where it is taken!
My sister uses to dislike enormously windstorms after a long stay in Brittany (see the wheather in Maine for exemple). Me I like summer, I like the heat, I like the pouring summer rain in a thunderstorm, I like the dog days of summer and their long refreshing evenings. I don’t like the cold, the drizzle or the snow.
The weather is what it is and we deal with it as we must. It is at once beautiful, daunting and inconvenient, as well as, essential, ignored my many and on occasion deadly. I find many analogies in weather to emotional life. I gave up long ago liking or disliking the weather though I do when I can position myself to avoid the uncomfortable weather just as much as uncomfortable situations with people. But what’s uncomfortable one day can be a blessing the next. Several days of subfreezing weather with a howling wind and snow up to your windows in the Pacific Northwest or North Dakota when you are sick of “chaining up” and you are more than ready for the blessed heat of South Texas or Oklahoma. Places with nearly constantly agreeable weather, say Southern California – what a bore it must be to be the weatherman for a TV station in Los Angeles – seem in someway always to have a kind of flat ambiance while places with highly variable weather, Central Texas and the Gulf Coast in wintertime, or the Northeast, NYC, Philly, Boston and the like in early Fall or late Spring, all seem to have more depth, a fuller flavor, if you will, the contrast between a simply good onion soup served in a resturaunt, perhaps, and a robust onion soup made just now in your own kitchen by your own hand or by your own cook, the kind of onion soup that’s alive with a flurry of flavors and textures, fresh onions, sharp cheese, newly made croutons and brand new fresh puff pastry on top, now that’s good weather and good onion soup. And, of course, as you might imagine someone might have just made me a wonderful onion soup at home yesterday before I got back on the road. But, you know, anxiety over the weather, really having a hard time with or without some particular type of weather that’s probably not healthy. Who is it M Scott Peck who says that real maturity is making yourself always available to the situation rather than demanding that the situation always be agreeable to you? Bitching about the weather would seem to be fruitless, change your location and if you can’t well get on it with all as best you can. One of my minor idols, C S Lewis, writes in the Screwtape Letters about worry the wonderful lines
It is truly the devils work, worry about the weather. Take a breath, enjoy whatever the weather brings and move on, the weather will change and so will your life. The photo would seem to be looking south – surely you wouldn’t cross the river to take the photo – down the river towards the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge during what would seem to be the beginning of a weather pattern that just might produce a nice little thunderstorm. Weather that lasts in the same pattern for long periods of time, Summer in Oklahoma or South Texas, winter in the Far North, is at best boring and at worst perhaps mentally damaging. Golly Wally! Have I stumbled onto the “problem with Southern California”? NYC will never be like anywhere else and certainly the weather helps. Poor souls in So Cal just don’t have a chance I’m afraid. Thanks for the photo.
Coincidence of great minds? I am taking “Lake Overturn” on my trip to Managua next week.
Wow, weather seems to have brought out all the poets? I wish to laud your deeply sympathetic and inspiring review of The Proposal, to which I treated myself only after the tip-off that you’d seen it twice and, so instigated, took myself to the theater to see it on Saturday afternoon. I note that the weather was beautiful and I probably squandered some earlier chance to see it when it was raining. PS I love weather. Period.