…on Amazon Prime.
Movie Review on Robert Ebert.com
Tag: memories
Lightly Child, Lightly.
As you embark on something like this, as you comb through the years, you are confronted with something like an identity parade of former selves. Here they come, shuffling into the white room, in front of the black horizontal bars, all dressed differently (up until around the age of 40 at any rate), all with slightly different haircuts, different ideas about the world, all awkwardly taking their place in the line-up and squinting at the two-way glass. Aspects of all these personas have been jettisoned along the way to get you to whoever you are now. The Usual Rejects. Some of these old versions of you will be more familiar than others, but, for most of us, they will all be shuffling around twitchily to some degree or other. Guilty. How do you rate these old selves? Look back ten or fifteen or twenty years. What was that guy like? How would you rank them in the pantheon of former selves? […]
But, still, here they both are, next to each other in the line-up, squinting into the glare, taking their turn stepping forward – ‘OK, you deadbeats. Start talking.’ Some of them you just want to fetch a mug of tea for. To roll out the good cop, the guy who will say, ‘Hey, you were young, don’t be too hard on yourself kid.’ But there are others, the real offenders, who you want to grab by the lapels and scream, ‘Are you kidding me with this shit?’ You want to reach back through the years and drag them down to the cells, where you will turn off the recording equipment and get busy with the rubber pipe and the rolled telephone book.
Because that’s what it feels like to me, the memoir. A forced confession.
― John Niven, O Brother (Canongate Books, August 24, 2023)
Notes:
- Book Review & Portrait of John Niven via Herald Scotland: “Author John Niven on his moving family memoir O Brother” August 19 2023
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Summer is… (and Yours?)
In my newsletter two weeks ago, I confessed my dislike of summer and invited you to send me emails defending the season. Hundreds of you responded, so what follows is a tiny and somewhat random sampling of your terrific contributions, for which I thank you.
Sam Sifton, in the Cooking newsletter, described the compression of time as we age: “Back-to-school advertising has started to show up in my feeds, and it’s depressing. Summers lasted forever when I was a child. Now they hurtle past, express trains bound for shorter days and hard shoes.”
Summer’s meaning and virtues hinge on place, age and more. “Childhood summer is the wilds of the neighborhood but grown-up summer is a hot car,” wrote Scott Williams of Salt Lake City. “Alpine summer is the smell of pine sap but downtown summer is the smell of asphalt. Summer on vacation is a novel but summer at home is a repair manual.”
Summer, many of you noted, is about certain fruits at their ripest, certain flavors at their peak, certain tastes that hide from us or are muted during the other parts of the year. “Only summer gives us blackberries for jelly and cobblers,” wrote Cheryl Roddy of Ooltewah, Tenn. “Only in summer can blueberries and peaches be turned into jams and frozen for winter pies. Only in summer do tomatoes taste like tomatoes and okra and beans grow in my garden, and butter-slathered, fresh-boiled corn makes me shout ‘Hallelujah! Continue reading “Summer is… (and Yours?)”
Woah…it’s you
Nostalgia
I have a great deal of nostalgia for Wigton. I had a very rich childhood in everything that mattered. I liked being able to knock on friends’ doors to ask if they were coming out to play. Looking back, I seem to have spent an awful lot of time playing. Wigton gave me a sense of friendliness towards everybody. You just nodded to people and said hello. That ease was helpful.
— Melvyn Bragg, from ‘At 83, time goes round too quickly’, in an interview by Kate Kellaway in the ’The Guardian · March 4, 2023
Live & Learn 