blogging

Ringing in the New Year


Why is it “ringing” in the year? Is this a bell tower reference from yore? Did bells herald the change over at one time? There is a carillon at the convent near my mom’s home. You can hear it ring throughout the day. I don’t know if they’re real bells or a digital facsimile, but it’s reassuring to hear time passing because sometimes it seems as though time has less impact than we fear and not as much as we’d like.

Traditionally, today is one of resolutions. The gym has been packed for weeks with people getting a jump on the weight loss/shape up new year cliché. Thankfully most of them will fail and I will not have to edge my way around fat women strolling abreast on a track where the signs reminding everyone of the importance of single file are clearly posted. Oh, that read quite cold, didn’t it? And I typed it out loud even. Bad me. But the gym is for exercise and the Starbucks is for prattling on about the latest gossip. Perhaps if I didn’t get those looks. The ones that imply I should simply walk slower and if I was more socially adept I too could be blocking the way with a chat buddy.

But today is the first day in a new you. We are new again on the 1st of every year when possibilities are endless and the slate is clean.

At least that is the theory.

I have goals. Does that count? I have my quarterly calendar posted and ready to direct me on matters such as memoir, blogging, reviews, writing groups, short stories and exercise.

I’ve got the yoga times blocked off and I am going to give spinning a serious attempt.

I made my first column inquiry a few days ago. Pitched me to a provincial magazine for moms and I received clarification on my sci-fi piece at last. It is with the editors, which is better than on its way back to me with a rejections notice, right?

Goals. Dreams. They make sense. Resolutions bring up images of shoeless prisoners being forced to march through ankle deep snow.

I will not be making resolutions again. Ironically, this is the only resolution I have ever made that has stuck.

Last night was movies with the family and homemade pizza. We had popcorn from the air popper Santa brought and later Rob and I toasted the new year together. Our second. No, our third. We exchanged new year’s greetings as 2006 rolled over to ’07 though not on the dot.

At supper Rob related having listened to a CNN piece on the countries which had already crossed into 2009. He listened to count downs in a variety of languages and wondered what all the fuss was about. Years are an arbitrary threshold. In eons gone by our ancestors were guided by the sun and met to mark the solstices, exchange goods and bloodlines. Now we gather to eat, drink – too much – and count, although goods are probably still exchanged along with a substantial amount of DNA.

Happy New Year from the Canadian prairies. Here’s hoping you eat, drank within limits which still allowed you to count, received some goods but remembered to don protection in the event of genetic exchanges (unless of course you were looking to improve your bloodlines).

Vertigo


Hitchcock was a sick, sick man. This is what I came away from my first full viewing of his “masterpiece” Vertigo feeling. Sick, perverted old man. With a deadly slow idea of how to set up a suspenseful mystery.

Okay, granted, I dislike mysteries as a rule. Despite having cut my teeth as a voracious reader on the likes of the Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and Hitchcock’s own Three Investigators before graduating to Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie, I just don’t have the patience anymore. I know what is going to happen before it does. Even Rob was impressed by my ability to predict the plot turns. I am rarely surprised. I knew the guy was really dead in The Sixth Sense the whole time which was a real buzzkill. But, Vertigo is more than a dull mystery. The main character is one sick little puppy, and it seemed that the movie was an exercise in making people squirm with discomfort more than anything else.

Basically main character,  Scottie, was duped into shadowing a woman who was supposedly possessed by her dead great-grandmother by the woman’s husband  – an old college chum – in order for him to use Scottie’s fear of heights to cover the murder of said granny inhabited wife. The dastardly husband hired a look-alike to impersonate his wife for Scottie’s benefit and play “crazy” . Then at the appointed time she runs up into a bell tower, where Scottie can’t follow her due to that inconvenient fear of heights thing and the resulting vertigo, and the husband is waiting for her with his already dead wife whom he throws off the balcony. The death is ruled a suicide with the help of Scottie’s testimony about the instability he witnessed. Husband jets off to Europe with inheritance (and probably a Playboy Bunny) and love-sick Scottie does a little time in the psych ward for “acute melancholy”. Seriously, that’s what they called it back then and, apparently, you look wan, can’t follow conversations and need to listen to Mozart when it strikes you.

Poor Scottie though had fallen in love with the wife, Madeleine.  When he ran across her impersonator (now a red-head instead of a platinum blonde), he recognized the face but thought she was merely a woman who looked like his dead love,  and was not the woman herself.

Now here is where it gets creepy. Instead of running off when she is found again, the woman plays along with Scottie as he “remakes” her into the image of Madeleine. She knows she is the woman he fell for but he thinks she is someone else and wants to recreate his lost love. He can’t love her until she is a replica of someone he believes is dead.

I couldn’t believe this was a classic. I had to look it up on Wikipedia and follow a few links to discover that I was right. It was until the 1970’s when it was pulled from distribution and someone included it in a book on great films (in his opinion) that the movie began to be regarded as one of Hitchcock’s great works. And then it was only considered great because it is so rough and choppy and because he was meticulous about his movies, it was supposed he did this deliberately for artistic effect.

The only thing edgy about this film – because the VistaVision effects are cheesy beyond even the least sophisticated audience 1958 could have offered – was Jimmy Stewart seeking to cure his grief through screwing the doppelganger of his dead lover.

Of course, there is a twist. It is Hitchcock. At the end, Scottie figures out what has happened and takes the woman, Judy, back to the bell tower to force the truth from her. As she is confessing and then professing her love for him, someone is seen in the shadows startling Judy into accidentally jumping from the same spot the real Madeleine was thrown from. Instant Karma.

I squirmed through the whole transformation of Judy. I can’t imagine needing love so desperately I would settle for being a stand-in for someone else. Literally.

And yeah, Scottie does bang her once the transformation is complete though due to the era there is the chaste cut away to his satiated post coital self waiting for Judy to finish dressing for dinner.  Should be grateful for 1950’s morality in this instance because at this point in the story, he thinks she is his Madeleine look-a-like rather than the actual woman he fell in love with. Maybe not on par with the X-Files episode where the man ices his lady friends down so they more corpse-like, but approaching that on some level where normal people don’t go.

Hitchcock loved the sick sad psyche, but usually the plot didn’t sputter or meander as much.

And the Winner is?


I assigned all those who entered the Matrimony giveaway a number and ran it through the randomizer and Random.org to ensure the complete and total randomness of the drawing, and so the personally autographed copy of Joshua Henkin’s novel Matrimony will be sent by the author himself to…

Unbearable Banishment!

If you could email me your mailing address, I will get that to Josh right away.

An unexpected side effect of this giveaway included another author contacting me about a giveaway! More details on this will be available after the New Year, but isn’t that exciting? I am liking this giving away of books, so much that I think I will give away some of the ARC’s I am collecting. I have three book reviews coming up in January and will have copies plus two more for February. If you like free books, do be on the look-out for opportunities in the next couple months.