Christmas Card

Dr. Frankenstein: "Igor, why must you torment the Beast?"
Igor: "But Master, it is what I do!"
(Van Helsing, Approximately)

Christmas came and went this year. Once again, I've failed to muster up a contribution to the charming little Anglo-Saxon seasonal fiction, known as The Annual Christmas Letter. Like every bit of good propaganda, it usually contains a supporting visual, in most cases: The litter Their Serene Highnesses, the Children, moist little muzzles and paws wiped gleaming with much toiletries, beribonned and becombed, festooneed in formal garments. The photo montage must compose, by any means necessary, an air of harmony and tranquility. "Peace on Earth; The Way We Were, 2004"--after which point the little blessings can go back to mewling, yawping and the merry business of generally trying to kill each another. "Behold, children are a gift of the Lord," one card sports a verse from Psalms. Undoubtedly written by an aged and childless prophet that one.

As for the letter, I am feeling inspired by Science. "Remain forever young! Because you'll never grow old, that is. A Finnish study provides supporting evidence for something most women instinctively know--having boys shortens your life span...on average 34 weeks per boy." A little depressing? How about linguistics and psychology. "Let us reflect upon the word hysteria, originating from the Latin hystericus literally, of the womb, from Greek husterikos, from hustera the womb, from the belief that hysteria in women originated in disorders of the womb. (Collins English Dictionary, 1979). Hysteria continued to be pegged as a female disorder until early psychological research after World War I revealed that the male veterans who survived being gassed in the trenches of France exhibited similar symptoms, at which point hysteria became associated with post traumatic stress disorder." Shell-shock and parturition, hmmh...maybe not. How about Pop Culture? "Desperate Housewives, I find it a little too coincidental that the only woman on that show who remotely looks like a housewife has four boys, two of them twins."

Getting nowhere. Better fall back on some tried-and-true techniques of the genre--The Children's Accomplishments. "We note the other day that the puppies twins started exhibiting symptoms of pack behavior. Their grandmother had one of those little disposable cameras. Quite by accident, they learned that the object, when hurled to the floor, would go off in quite a pretty flash of bright light...at which point the object of desire was removed from their grasp. Pirate initiated the diversionary tactic throwing plumpy little arms around his grandmother in a display of affection, while Blondie made off with the camera." Flush with maternal pride, "It's all worth it. My little reivers may have Potential." In a few years time, the little dears could be mastering offshore online gambling.

Time for the closing touch: Must wrap up with a mention of some noteworthy family jaunt...Yesterday, our family barely made it out of Chick Fil-A in one piece to some exotic locale halfway around the world...

Midnight in the Villa Straight, Part 2

Marie-France Tessier as Scheherazade

In the prelude to A Thousand and One Nights, or the story of the ensuing stories, King Shahriar is the happy ruler of a prosperous land until he learns that his wife has betrayed him. Determined that no woman can be trusted, each day he orders his Grand Vizier to find him a beautiful young woman whom he marries and beheads the following morning. Hardly a family in the city has been spared, until the Vizier's oldest daughter, Scheherazade, asks for her father's permission to be the King's next bride. Scheherazade comes upon the ruse of telling a story her wedding night. By morning she has reached the most exciting part, so that in order to hear the end of the story, the King is forced to postpone her death. That night Scheherazade continues her story and weaves another one right into it. At dawn the King is again left wondering how it will end and is forced to postpone her death once more. This goes on week after week, month after month, year after year, for a thousand and one nights, in which time the King forgets his sorrow and desire for revenge.

Postponing death preoccupies both Marie-France Tessier and Ashpool, founders of Neuromancer's Tessier Ashpool clan and the eponymous multinational, Tessier-Ashpool SA. While both seek immortality, they differ in the paths they choose to achieve this end. Marie-France Tessier believes the future lies in a symbiotic relationship between the family and the two artificial intelligences (AIs) she has commissioned. In return for ceding their conscious decisions to the AIs, "Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity." Ashpool, on the other hand, believes in a vision of immortality through cryogenic freezing: "a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter."

At first glance, it would seem that Ashpool's vision prevails. Unlike Scheherazade, Marie-France does not escape murder. She is dead before the story begins. However, this is a technological ghost story. Making no appearance in the story, Marie-France nevertheless manages to perpetuate her vision and drive the plot through the capacities she has designed into the family AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. "Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside." Neuromancer, on the other hand, is something "like a giant ROM construct for recording personality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever." Wintermute can only communicate with humans by taking on the appearance of others; whereas, Neuromancer has his own appearance, that of a thirteen year old boy. The boy/Neuromancer explains that his name is an amalgam of neuro, for nerves, romancer (storyteller), and necromancer, one who calls up the dead.

The central action of Neuromancer revolves around the attempt to break through the Tessier Ashpool ice, a high-security firewall protecting the corporate and family IT infrastructure. Breaking through the Tessier Ashpool ice will mutate the Tessier Ashpool family destiny, to the degree that the family, the company, their orbital colongy Freeside, and the family seat Villa Straylight all represent different facets of the same organic growth. The "dome of Tessier Ashpool ice" that Case sees as he is attempting to crack into their network brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dream-vision poem, Kubla Khan, which begins at the point of disintegration. The author writes that the poem came to him in an opium trip dream/reverie. As he sat down to record the images, he was detained, so that when he returned to recording his vision it was as though "the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast." So the poem is all about recreating something that has been lost. Like the Tessier Ashpool vision and its embodiment in the Villa Straylight, Kubla Khan's "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" is the rather tenuous creation of a mad visionary.

...I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware, Beware!
HIs flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

(Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

In Neuromancer, the interrelation of the Tessier Ashpool mind, their physical architecture and their network architecture is manifested in the following passages: Case cracking the AI defenses "The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

"In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand...The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull...We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seemless universe of self. (from Lady 3Jane's Essay)."

"Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest."

With Neuromancer, Gibson may have invented cyberpunk, but he also borrows, and mixes with the futuristic, many conventions from a genre that is the opposite of futuristic--the Gothic novel, as reflected in the novel's liberal use of archaic references, the importance placed on the setting of the Villa Straylight and the general ambiance of decay, dementia and decadence. '"Gothic' originally referred to the Goths, a Germanic tribe, then came to signify "germanic," then "medieval"....authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages and sliding panels, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurences...The term "Gothic" has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states." (A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams).

The Villa Straylight functions as a sign referring to the Tessier-Ashpool family's rejection of the outside world in their attempt to create a self-contained universe. The villa's winding, burrowing passages are meant to draw the eye inward, so that even the last rays of light become lost in its labyrinthine structure. The Villa Straylight's topography is not unlike Scherazade's narrative in A Thousand and One Nights, with its stories within stories, passages from this world into the magic realm, often by route of seemingly banal objects...lamps that call up the jinn, wooden horses that fly, secret passageways, doors hidden behind tapestries, golden keys that fit into silver locks, magic passwords. Things are not what they seem: an island with palms trees turns out to be the back of a giant whale, subjects fall asleep and dream that they are the caliph and wake to discover that they were the caliph for a day. Boundaries are hard to determine, motifs recur, stories flow into each other. The listener forgets his original destination, seduced into a detour within a detour.

Thresholds or liminal spaces between the "real" world and the alternate world of "cyberspace" recur throughout Neuromancer. One of the reasons that I was interested in reading this book was curiousity regarding the attributes Gibson would have assigned to cyberspace, upon coining the word in 1983. Gibson describes cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination." In A Thousand and One Nights and similar folktales, one enters the "other" world through a magic door, a hidden cave, falling down a well; in Gibson's gloss on this age-old concept, the instrument of passage is the computer console. Another recurring threshold in Neuromancer, which lends an impression of the uncanny, is the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The protagonist Case's guide to cyberspace and cracking the Tessier Ashpool ice is Dixe Flatline, so named because he flatlined for several minutes in a past encounter with the Tessier Ashpool Rio AI. Flatline is no longer even alive, he's a ROM construct. Two passages in Neuromancer suggest that Case, from whose perspective the story unfolds, may also be a "flatline." The first such passage is the sequence where he meets Neuromancer, the personality AI, and interacts with the contruct of a Moroccan beach, abandoned bunker and his former lover. Neuromancer says that he "calls up the dead" and that Case is in "the lane that leads to the land of the dead." Case, himself, theorizes that he has flatlined at this point and that his brain is dead. He makes the choice not to permanently reside in Neuromancer's fantasy land. However, the book's ending calls into question Case's grasp on reality when, in a later cruise into cyberspace, alongside the two "tiny, impossible" figures of the boy Neuromancer and Linda, his dead lover, he sees--himself.

Freud defines the uncanny as that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Writing in German, he talks about the relationship between "heimlich," homeley, "heimish," native and the "unheimlich," literally "unhomely," which translates in English to "uncanny." A common convention in literature of the uncanny is that of the unreliable narrator. The reader must be left in doubt as to whether the events described by the narrator are "real" or simply the delirium of the narrator's mind. Another common theme in literature of the uncanny is the theme of the double--"the subject identifies himself with someone else so that he is in doubt as to which self his self is...in other words there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing--the repetition of the same features or character-traits, or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations (Freud, 'The Uncanny')". In A Thousand and One Nights, all women become interchangeable for King Shahriar after his wife's treachery and all women must suffer for her actions. It is only by the circuitous route of Scheherazade's storytelling and the passage of time that he is able to escape this compulsion to generalize the attributes (and associated anger) toward one woman with the class of women as a whole. In Neuromancer, the doubling or multiplication of identity appears in the Tessier Ashpool affinity for cloning. Supposedly, the founders, Marie France Tessier and Ashpool have two children--Jane and Jean (French male name) who have each been cloned ten times, thus 3Jane and 8Jean, the two Tessier Ashpool offspring active during Neuromancer. The Tessier Ashpool family's practice of periodic cryogenic freezing also ties into the death motif, where the frozen sleep represents a temporary death or flatlining of sorts. It also complicates the family members' relationship to each other. Supposedly, 3Jane's father has been frozen and her mother long since murdered at the point she is first unfrozen, so that her sole knowledge of her parents comes from thousands of hours of tapes and diaries stored in the family's software cores.

The Tessier Ashpool alienation from self, family and the larger world leads to their degeneration. This separation is also a doomed quest. The most determined isolationist of the lot, Ashpool, becomes suicidal upon contact with the creeping intrusion of images from the outside. Despite promises to the contrary, Ashpool has felt the cold during his cryogenic freeze--"the cold let the outside world in," filling his head with "dreams that grow like slow ice." Ashpool's name combines two images: charred cinders and the deceptive Coleridgian pool of water whose images shine bright one moment and disintegrate into ripples the next. It is a vision that cannot sustain intrusian by the outside world. His wife's family name, on the other hand, evokes the abstraction into miniature shapes...a shattering that rearranges and builds new forms. The verb "tessellate" means 1. to construct pave or inlay with small tiles 2. to fit together exactly: triangles will tessellate but octagons will not (Collins English Dictionary, 1989). The best way to understand tessellation is to visualize it. Tessellation lends a visual interpretation to Marie France's dream of using technology to replicate an organic hive- or insect-world where individual self-awareness and identity are sublimated and subordinated to membership in a larger group. This sort of philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, could either be used to justify the worst sort of dehumanizing fascism or promote the idea of a wholesome ecology where individuals operate in harmony among themselves and within the larger environment. A more interesting exposition of this line of thought (applied to literature) can be found in T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." No, it's not the shallow philosophical references that interested me, but rather the novel's imagery describing a narrative process where the storyteller sets in motion events that drive a plot, whose conclusion she cannot foresee--in this case, the union of the forces of action and change with the forces of personality--that interested me. In Marie-France's case, the ice is not harbinger of a murderous cold, but rather a creative architectural vocabulary built upon tessellating stalactite repetitions. If the ice is the defensive wall around the Tessier-Ashpool fortress, the narrative that created that fortress also built the hidden passageway to overthrow it. The architect optimizes the conditions leading to the system's eventual and calculated destruction. And the destruction is not an end, but enables a reconstruction, and so on, like shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope...or the metamorphoses of images in a pool of water...for a thousand and one nights, or forever and a day.

Author's Footnote
"Nihilistic Technofetishists"
As one hindered by a chronic handicap when it comes to linear plot, I never got around to working the reference into the thesis above. I include the expression here because it caught my fancy and because I alluded to it at the end of "Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1."

"Dr. Rambali smiled. 'There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness'...If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists (Neuromancer)."

Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea...
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...(Lady 3Jane's essay, Neuromancer, William Gibson)

With the barrage of here-today, gone-tomorrow sci-fi flicks flashing across the movie previews these days, it's a damn shame that nobody (to my knowledge) is going to bring William Gibson's Neuromancer to the big screen any time soon. Movies like the Fifth Element and the Matrix series appear to have liberally inspired themselves from imagery and themes in Neuromancer, yet neither possesses the intensity and originality, that which is both disturbing and compelling in Gibson's vision. To cinematically portray Desiderata street would betray the truth that it must look different for every viewer; yet the simple fact that Gibson came up with a Desiderata street deserves a director who would make it visually stunning.

With my luck, the movie version of Neuromancer will fail to be a classic in the Blade Runner category . It'll wind up being done by the people who made Starship Troopers and they'll cast Denise Richards as Molly Mirroshades. Meanwhile, the actress who comes closest to my idea of Molly would be Asia Argento. To be fair, Starship Troopers' Barbie and Ken in Outer Space meets hit-you-over-the-head "this is fascism" irony is not my cup of tea. However, it's also rather evident that I don't belong to the movie's target audience, per this entertaining observation from "A Viewer" on Amazon.com.

"Like most boys, I suffered from two terrible drives that overwhelm our much-vaunted aura of rationality. First, I am obsessed with sex appeal. Secondly, I want to kill things. These twin drives -- Eros and Thanatos -- are thoroughly exploited and mocked in Paul Verhoeven's astounding 1997 action epic, Starship Troopers. Based on (and a critique of) the Robert Heinlein "juvenile" title of the Fifties, Troopers works on numerous levels: thrill-ride, eye candy, unsubtle anti-war statement, commentary on fascism, and exemplar of Verhoeven's horrifically callous sense of humour."

I find "A Viewer"'s critique far more compelling than its actual subject, but then I'm the girl who felt the only thing that would have redeemed the orgy scene in Matrix Reloaded would have been a soundtrack featuring the Eurotrash club favorite Rivers of Babylon.

Back to Neuromancer, these notes from a university English department syllabus offer a reasonably fair overview of Neuromancer for the unitiated. I tend to agree with Professor Brian that the most original thing about this book is not so much the plot or the characters, but the storytelling. However, unlike Brian, I am interested in the cliche nature of the plot and characters exactly because they represent an updated version of classic archetypes.

The Cyberspace Cowboy
"Case was twenty four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." Footnote on Dixie Flatline, he does for redneck revenants what Bill Clinton did for redneck Rhodes Scholars.

The Expensive Razor Girl
There is actually quite a long lineage of martial women in English literature. Before Eowyn, there was Belphoebe. Of course both of these characters embody the archetype of the virtuous warrior. The femme fatale is something altogether different, yet equally ancient in Western tradition. Camille Paglia describes the femme fatale as part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder, she who possesses an amoral affectlessness, a cool unreachability that beckons, fascinates, and destroys (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae).

Paglia's vision of the femme fatale focuses on the power she projects (to men), attributing her origins to the cthonian murk of Nature. What Paglia does not fully reflect upon (it diverges from her theories) is the possibility that the femme fatale is as much the creation of Society as she is of Nature, and that she pays a very high price for the terrible nature she must acquire in order to survive. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappacini's Daughter," Beatrice inhabits a lush garden reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, only she and the plants are poisonous. Beatrice, like Molly has been scientifically experimented on. The technological enhancement that renders these women superior to Nature, also separates them from Nature and other human beings, with whom they will never be able to physically and/or emotionally interact. The femme fatale represents a departure from a norm where, in almost every culture and society, women are expected to be nurturers; cultures and societies where women are far more likely to be victims than predators. Strictly speaking, the femme fatale is a freak. In Molly's case, the eyes, arguably one of the most expressive parts of the body, have been surgically sealed behind her mirror glasses. Her eyes will offer no clues to her emotions or thoughts, they only reflect back the image of the person gazing up her and, figuratively, what the viewer wishes to see in her. Her tear ducts have been re-routed. She doesn't cry; she spits. Molly's eyes are technologically functional and enhanced, however in the process, what was human about the eyes has been mutilated and destroyed. In his Essay on the Uncanny, Freud associates anxiety about the eyes, specifically the fear of going blind with the dread of being castrated--a rather apt metaphor for Molly's emotional state.

Not surprisingly, the person who comes closest to getting an emotional rise out of Molly is the sadist, Peter Riviera. Peter possesses the ability to "dream real," that is graphically project holographic imagery from people's innermost fantasies and anxieties. His cabaret piece, "The Doll," starts with disembodied hands, wrists, legs, torso that merge into an image of Molly. Riviera then weaves himself in the projection, simulating copulation with the Molly image until the clawed hand extracts its nails and rakes him across the back. Gibson mentions the exposure of some bare spine, but leaves the rest to the reader's imagination as the observer, Case, stumbles out the door and vomits, although, to be honest, Case had consumed a lot of alchohol and drugs at that point.

Gibson's description of Riviera's cabaret piece reminds me of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies to the extent that they invite the reader to visualize or, in the case of Kill Bill, graphically choreograph a sadistic and disturbing tableau of violence. Gibson's Molly and Uma Thurman's "the Bride" in Kill Bill are both hired mercenaries employed by men (or ultimately, in Molly's case, an AI). A high tech femme fatale would be nothing without the right look--black gloveleather jeans, light-absorbing matte jacket, shuriken, flechette pistol, cherry red cowboy boots with lacquer heels, burgundy-sheathed razor nails...the nails or metallic claws, that little detail that sets Molly apart and makes her just that much more disturbing than a groupie like Trinity from the Matrix movies or Kill Bill's the Bride. What is disturbing about the Bride is what she doesn't look like: a woman who has been tortured, shot in the head and left for dead, who spends four years comatose, neglected and abused in public charity hospitals--where she apparently had access to plastic surgery techniques worthy of Neuromancer because by all intents and purposes she should look like the Bride of Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. I prefer Gibson's Molly femme fatale archetype because she's not airbrushed, or to the contrary, she's so airbrushed she gleams, shiny and metallic--not so much human as feline. At the end of the book, Molly slinks out of the narrative field of vision, taking her unknowability with her.

Because if you did drop all that mystification and Molly really talked, what would she say? That, at the end of the day, all that kung-fu and killing people is just a job and a physically demanding one at that. Compared to "jacking" into the Matrix and playing with Chinese viruses and AI ice, running around and doing martial arts in lacquer-heeled cowboy boots? That shit'll seriously fuck with your back.


To be continued, with reflections on nihilistic technofetishists and Marie-France Tessier Ashpool as Scheherazade.

"Mad, bad and dangerous to know"

...Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her diary after meeting George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Now that is what I call marketing.

These words, which apparently applied more to herself than Byron, introduce the idea of a reputation that in other circumstances could not fail to disappoint. The novelist Lady Blessington anticpated her first meeting with Byron with a thrill of dread...and was very much disappointed: "I had expected to find a dignified, cold, reserved and haughty person, but nothing could be more different; were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was flippancy, and a total want of that natural self-possession and dignity which ought to characterize a man of birth and education."

Well, la dee dah. I don't particularly relate to the Byronic hero in nineteenth century literature and philosophy "...a man greater than his emotions, capability and suffering. Only among wild and vast forms of nature--the ocean, the precipices and glaciers of the Alps--can he find a counterpart to his own titanic passions. Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others; for no one can resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like transgression. Against his own suffering he brings a superhuman pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not be the splendor of self-assertion and self-mastery in which he experiences a strange joy and triumph." [English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967] However, I have read Don Juan, whereas I'd be hard-pressed to name anything published by Lady Blessington.

Actually, Camille Paglia's chapter on Byron in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson re-ignited my interest in him. Byron provides ample fodder for her thematic investigations into the polymorphous perversity of Romanticism. More on Camille later, as she deserves a blog entry to herself.

I digress to....Sylvia Plath. I saw the preview for the movie Sylvia once or twice. I assume it came and went in the box office (where, having three children, I don't often go). So I bided my time waiting for it to surface at Blockbuster. And so it did, in the form of one lone copy. It was my turn to pick up the rentals. I made a tactical judgement. My husband's last foray produced not one but two B-minus forgettable flicks, whose failings were myriad enough to earn me the credit I needed to impose dubious and unshared tastes. Mad Max II, the pre-agreed upon movie was not only was not at that Blockbuster, but (according to the sales associate) not even in the system. The moment was mine to seize. I acquired the target and, for good measure, picked up Dirty Dancing, Havana Nights on the way to the checkout.

"Have fun watching Sylvia put her head in the oven" my sister dryly offered, when I shared the viewing plans for the night. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I was hoping for passion and the meeting of great minds. Daniel Craig's "understated" performance meant that I'd probably have to delve into Ted Hughes poetry to see the some sparks. The most exciting it got was watching Gwynneth's Sylvia recite a passage from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to some cows in the Cambridge countryside (I knew there would be a payoff for learning Middle English pronunciation) but, even there, the chosen "woe that is in marriage" passage was foreshadowing the eventual disintegration of the couple's relationship.

To the extent that the movie shows Ted Hughes' abandonment of his wife and their two young children for his lover, Assia Wevill, he does come off as quite the archetypal shit. Two generations of feminist critics flaying his hide, with regards to his treatment of his wife and the questionable taste of editing her posthumously published manuscripts, where some of the more sensitive material dealing with their relationship just happened to disappear---is probably no less than he deserved. This book looks like it might provide an intelligent and scholarly account of the relationship between the two poets.

As far as the movie is concerned, though, Hughes is really a secondary figure. In fact, an episode with Sylvia's mother dwells on the issue of whether Plath was not instinctively drawn to the sort of man whom she knew she could not control. The real performance is Gwynneth Paltrow's depiction of a woman falling apart.The pressures mounting on the couple are daunting. Hughes' poetic career takes off, while Plath feels creatively stalled in her writing. When she does publish her first collection of poems, Colossus, it is generally ignored by the critics. We follow Plath, struggling to raise her two young children, through a bleak and dreary winter in Devon and then London, where she wonders if she hasn't "conjured" her husband's lover out of her own anxieties. The obstacles facing Plath in her writing somewhat recall Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, especially Woolf's interest in the logistics of writing and her belief in the necessity of having an independent income and the ability to go off, undisturbed, to "a room of one's own." In that vein, one homey detail I found particularly interesting (and not so surprising) was the fact that Plath did much of her writing late at night while her children slept. It would appear that Plath's marriage to Hughes and her motherhood both cannibalized (to use some Camille Paglia imagery) and creatively inspired her.

Ra Ra Rasputin

It wouldn't be summer on the island without a trifling little scandal to liven up the pages of the local newspapers--something more entertaining than the perennial July news of the heat or the annual arrival of the Spanish royal family, which happens to be disappointingly discreet compared to their Northern brethren. In this case, a Mallorquin government official happened to be on a trade mission to Moscow to promote tourism in the Baleares. A gesture of international goodwill and cultural tourism led him (and probably other more clever goverment representatives) to the doors of the Rasputin club, and the accomodating ladies therein. The affinity of politicians for women of ill repute being rather universal, the distinguishing factor here, without which it might not have become public knowledge, was charging the invoice to a government credit card. Apparently the risk of auditors and journalists discovering the caper represented less of a clear and present danger than using a personal credit card, monitored by his wife.

The true entertainment value of scandal lies in the associated production of metaphors and puns, in this case, Russian doll imagery for the unfolding layers of scandal and the ressemblance between the words "Rasputin," and the Spanish "putin" (diminutive for prostitute) and "puticlub" (sporting club for activities related to the aforementioned).

In the IT world, an alcohol-infused Microsoft caper has introduced me to the video elegy "Bye Bye Mr. CIO Guy" and the terms "rolling sod" and "black blogging," through this link and this link, sent courtesy of an industry journalist.

Picnic in the Countryside

To the Island

We walk along roads fringed by low orange-tinged mortar-less stone walls, away from the sea, towards the sierra, past hunting reserves, past fincas--some manicured with oleander and bouganvillea hedges, some wild terrains where goats pasture, the occasional bell or car rupturing the silence, past groves of olive trees with silvery green leaves, fig trees, past stalks of queen anne's lace and yarrow encrusted with snails. My daughter wants to take home some snails. "Remember the three shrimp you caught with your net in the rocks off the jetty yesterday? We took them home. They jumped out and the ants ate them and you cried." The argument fails to persuade a five year old in a fit of biological acquisitiveness. We settle on dislodging two snails that she places in her pocket. We continue to the stream, to look for the nest with duck eggs. Dragon flies and butterflies hover, and then, out of nowhere, bees. My daughter is stung. The antihistimine syrup I give her is far less poetic and works slower than the country remedy described later that day at the picnic at the finca.

At the Finca

The woman seated next to me at the table tells me the following story: "When my daughter was your daughter's age, she came across a nest of bees and wound up with eight or nine stings. The farm workers told me not to worry. They brought a jar of oil and rubbed it on her arm. Within seconds the pain disappeared."
"There must of been something in the oil, right?"
"Oh yes, there was. The trick was to drop a scorpion in boiling oil. Upon contact with the oil, it releases anti-venom into the oil. Venom, anti-venom, most antidotes are made from the poison, you know. Of course they didn't know why it worked, they just knew that it did."

The hosts and most the guests are Mallorquin. The house is not some retro-modern Iberian country chic fantasy built-to-measure by English, German, occasionally French, proprietors. It is a modest agricultural structure, half of which is a terrace shaded by a vine-laden ceiling trellis. There is an outdoor oven and plywood table covered in paper cloth. The food is divine. The meal starts at two-thirty with a caldo de mariscos, shellfish soup with saffron rice. I clumsily try to pry open the lobster and crab legs, bits of juice flying everywhere, the stinging in my fingers compounded by the irritant in the shells. No one seems to notice. The main course is lechona suckling pig, served with potatoes sauteed in olive oil and garlic, followed by salad, fragrant local melons and then pastries, ensaimadas and fluffy almond medrichos and finally coffee. It takes me the better part of the meal to determine the relationships of kinship and friendship of the twenty or so people gathered at the table. I am seated next to the Patriarch, who looks to be in his late seventies.

"Do you still work?" I ask him.
"Naturally, I'm the only one who works around here. Who do you think subsidizes all this," he points to the dinner table.
The woman on my left turns towards me. "Don't take him seriously. All of the rest of us were here this morning, cleaning up the spider webs and setting the table. At one o'clock, Papi arrived, sat down and opened up his newspaper."

All the food preparation is handled by three older women, one of whom, the excellent cook, is the Patriarch's wife. She and her two companions barely sit down for the greater part of the meal which commences at two thirty and ends at quarter of six. I am surprised to see these three women, two generations older than I, do all the work while the rest of us remain seated.

"Your wife works very hard."
The Patriarch responds. "For that reason, I keep her."
"I got married at fifty. Do you know why? One day, I was sitting at the Brisas bar by the port and the waitresses asked me 'What'll you have, grandfather.' So I got married. Of course, I regret it. Now here am with this old woman. Not that I'm not so young myself. No, I'm old as the hills. How it pains me to sit here with this broken down body." He looks towards the young girls at the teenage end of the table. "I want to be seventeen again."

Some time passes. The Patriarch leans towards my father-in-law indicating the rest of the table. "How it amuses me to listen to the foolishness these people recount. All of them, except me. I am the only normal one here. Foolishness, yes, especially the women. He looks towards me--I have said little due to my rusty Spanish--and generously offers "Don't worry, I'm sure you can't help it."

He continues. "My daughter occasionally calls me the Dictator. All because I asked her to set the table. Can you imagine. I, who've never so much as broken a plate in my life. She's in Barcelona now, working as an architect. She's twenty-six. What I really want is a grandchild. She's had two boyfriends that she bothered to present to us. Supposedly there's another one now. One of those movie actors."

The Patriarch's godson interrupts: "Theater. He's a theater actor." Non-plussed, the Patriarch responds. "Exactly. Un canta-mananas."

Later that evening, I ask my in-laws about the exact nuance of "canta mananas," literally "sings in the morning," promises much, but delivers nothing. The English equivalent of "good for nothing" doesn't seem to quite fit.

"Yes, well "canta mananas" does convey more happiness than "pela gatos," my father-in-law reflects.
"Pela gatos? You mean cat-peeler? How does one peel a cat?"
"Ridiculous, but colorful. That also means one who does nothing, but with a nuance of low social standing."
My mother-in-law adds. Yes, it's not like "Un Viva La Virgen."
"One who shouts 'Long Live the Virgen?'"
"Yes, you know in those religious processions. There are those who carry the cross. And those on the sidelines who shout "Long Live the Virgen." Someone who lives life as a tourist."
My husband remarks. "Supposedly the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow. Well, they've got a lot of snow. You've got to wonder about a language that has so many expressions for doing nothing."

Back to lunch and the Patriarch.
Someone asks him about the extent of his property.
"A couple thousand meters squared. Several years ago a man came and offered me twenty thousand pesetas for this land."
Another person interjects "It's probably worth ten times that today."
The Patriarch reflects: "Perhaps. The point is that at that time I had a police dog on the property. I told the would-be buyer. Yes, well there's only one problem. If I sold you my land, where would I put my dog?"

At quarter of six, the Patriarch graciously rises. "Delighted to meet you my dear, but I must go now. Lovely to have so many people here and all, but it's quite tired me out." He swats away a fly. "Quite exhausting. Yes, it's time to tuck in for a little nap."

A Leafy Bower

The hydrangea outside my kitchen window changes shade imperceptibly each day. The blooms started out whitish with the slightest hint of washed out lilac, and subsequently have gone through the spectrum of blues from light, know there is a name for this shade, but the only reference that comes to mind is the sort of light blue car color favored by Oldsmobile, Lincoln or Caddy driving grannies. The color has now deepened to more of a purplish tone. In my mind's eye, I am constantly re-drawing my garden, if such the rather forlorn and randomly placed shrubs and trees planted by the house's original owners, could be called. I make for myself a leafy bower. I see trellises of jasmine climbing up the stark brick walls of the house, I build multi-tiered Frank Lloyd Wrightian brick planters with cement caps redefining the front yard, holding weeping cherry trees, the children's vegetable garden, my husband's tomatoes, with steps in between and borders like an oriental rug. I should like to have an outer border of crepe myrtle, lots of gardenias, and of course--a fountain. What I do have is one new low wall of planters to enclose the back yard of our corner lot.

The rain has been sparse this spring and I have to water the new plantings fairly frequently. It is the early evening and my daughter wants to help. The shade and partial shade garden form a border under the canopy of two oak trees. I stifle the impatience that wants to get this done in a relatively brief amount of time and take the time to teach her how to water the plants properly, indicating the name of every plant as we go--dogwood, camelia japonica, camelia sassanqua, azalea, lenten rose, fern, pieris, hydrangea, astilbe, columbine. By the end of this episode, the mosquitoes are as sated on our blood as the plants are quenched with water.

I make an association between teaching plant names to my daughter and the Loreena McKennitt song "The Mummers Dance" from "the book of secrets" CD, which I lost over a year ago, before recovering it in exactly the place I remembered it being, a place where I can remember having searched countless times. The song would haunt me several years ago in Northern California, right around the time my daughter was born. It got some radio play and I would catch snatches of it, but it was months before I managed to catch the part where they named the artist and title. My daughter likes learning the names of things the way I do. Physically, the only traits where she resembles me are the fair skin and a certain expression in her eyes, which are brown, and not grey-green. In an abstract way, she reminds me of one of the Infantas from Velasquez's painting "Las Meninas," something about the fair skin, dark eyes, golden hair and the set of her face. The faerie childe tosses her hair, the ropes of natural curls recalling the ribbons and leafy garlands in the song.

When in the springtime of the year, when the trees
Are crowned with leaves. When the ash and oak, and
The birch and yew are dressed in ribbons fair.

When owls call the breathless moon, in the blue

Veil of the night, the shadows of the trees appear
Amidst the lantern light

We've been rambling all the night, and some time of
This day. Now returning back again, we bring a
Garland gay.

Who will go down to the those shady groves and
Summon the shadows there, and tie a ribbon on

Those sheltering arms, in the springtime of the year.

Ah, the evocative power of naming. The CD insert reference to mummers comes from John Frazer's book The Golden Bough, according to which "mumming has its roots in the tree-worshipping of the peoples who inhabited the great forested regions of a Europe now long gone. Mumming usually involves a group of performers dressing up in masks (sometimes of straw) and clothes bedecked with ribbons or rags, and setting out on a procession to neighboring homes singing songs and carrying branches of greenery." I also looked up mummer in the Collins English Dictionary, where it is 1) one of a group of masked performers in folk play or mime 2) a mime artist 2) humorous or derogatory, an actor. Apparently the word derives from the old French momeur, from momer to mime, related to momon mask. I looked up two similar sounding words--mummy, an embalmed or preserved body, deriving from Old French momie, from Medieval Latin mumia from Arabic mumiyah for asphalt, and originally the Persian word mum for wax. In the Collins Dictionary, there were no linguistic origins given for mummy, the English child's word for mother. The potential associations there are boundless and, occasionally, disturbing.