Dickinson, Durrells and Mendelson

I did some serious loafing and watching this weekend, having done all the gratitude earlier in the week, celebrating Thanksgiving early. I did turn the game hen leftovers into a nice soup, with carrots and spices.  But food not the centerpiece.

Something has to be really good to keep my attention for an entire evening of viewing, without even the relief of freecell going, or a book, or Twitter, or something.  It's the oh look a bird syndrome.

And it's this

a wonderful film, not a movie, about Emily Dickinson, great acting from Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, and other superstars and written and directed by Terence Davies, whose work I didn't know before,  but really should have.

You know how in every good novel, film, piece of music, artwork, there's a passage which just says everything? The whole work is just the setting for that diamond? Like the debate between Rosamund and Dorothea in Middlemarch? Like the man's hand of the boy David in the Michelangelo David?

Here it's the scene where Emily has just shown her work to an admired outsider, and is waiting for him to read and react.  Her silent but totally eloquent waiting and all the emotions, suppressed and bursting out and being corralled in her tiny facial movements   we can read, is just a masterclass in how to do it.  

She's not depicted as a heroine, but as quite difficult and flawed as well as a genius, but full of uncertainty mixed with rock solid belief in her work.  Ehle plays her sister Vinnie, and there's a hilarious little point, obviously an in-joke inserted by the writer or maybe by Nixon, where Emily refers to Pride and Prejudice, and Vinnie brushes it off with yes, yes, I know about that.  Remembering her performance as Elizabeth Bennet, in the most famous production of PP there ever was!  It was a delicious moment.

And then, hardly fair to them, I came next evening to see the first season of The Durrells in Corfu, sort of loosely based on Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals.  

It went fine for a couple of episodes, lovely scenery, getting to know a quirky family.  Then it seemed to me that the writers began to think that scenery, wildlife and Keeley Hawes as Mrs. Durrell weren't enough to keep on with, and introduced some wildly awkward subplots and deeply uneasy dialog about sexuality.  

Best roles were the boy playing young Gerry, and the man playing Theodore his tutor. Oh, and the woman playing Lugaretzia, the dramatic housekeeper, was good.  The others were largely overractors, trying so hard to be funny or poignant or something, and just sort of acting. Okay, but it did suffer from being seen after A Quiet Passion.

I doubt if I'll follow them to the second season.  But if you can deal with accordions as well as bouzouki music, you might like this one. 

Then there's a thing I just noticed about this, the great classic tome about housekeeping
 

Packed with research and detail, and very useful in a lot of ways.  But when it comes to actually making a home, though she claims this knowledge is part of it, I see a gaping hole in her attentions.
I searched all over for mention of houseplants, since to me they are a wonderful source of life, clean air, peace, and a bond with nature, in your home all year.  And there they weren't.  

I looked all over, in the index, nothing under houseplant, nothing under plant, in fact the index goes straight from plague to plastic without stopping at plant.  Then flowers, ah, one reference.  And she means, in a passing, throwaway sort of way, CUT flowers.  Flowers with their heads off, as my mom used to say.  And not important, just a tiny detail you might consider. Just decor.

So, this reminds me of the garden lady, Rosemary Verey, I blogged about some time ago. Despite her wonderful work on gardens she designed and with much generous explanation and help to other gardeners at all levels, she totally fails even to register, let alone discuss, birds and small animals who live in gardens. A vital part of the ecology of the garden, in fact.

This may simply mean that my idea of home is not that of Cheryl Mendelson, true.  But it does seem like a significant lack. Houseplants, even a tiny group, are a great part of the ecology of the home.  What she does write is fabulous, well researched and really well written, what a joy.  And there's a lot on pets. So I'm seeing what she doesn't write, how annoying of me. On the other hand, she spent years writing this one, and maybe she's at work on another massive tome on houseplants.  I kinda doubt it.