I just looked at the calendar of my office closings for the next year. I swear, we are closed half of September. Labor Day, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, sure. What is Sukkot? Or Shemini Atzeret? I've never heard of those. Not that I don't mind having paid time off. _

There are things less fitting than finding out that the man who played Nero Wolf passed away by reading the actor who played Archie's tweets. _

What my book club has read:

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
This is really a collection of short stories, all set in one town, with Olive Kitteridge running vaguely through all of them. Most of the stories are unhappy, and most of the people are old.
Theme: Depressing stories about old people

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
I confess, I only started this and then I was out of town and missed two months of books while I took care of my grandmother. I liked the beginning, anyway, and Diaz reminded me a little of the Foer and Eggers. It's an immigrant tale, full of fantasy and superheroes.
Theme: Immigrants

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The other one I missed, and I haven't even thought of going back to it. I understand it's a post-apocolyptic thing, all dark and violent, and I think the main character is dying.
Theme: I have no idea

March, by Gerladine Brooks
This is like Little Women fanfiction, and it was no good at all, although I often got March's horror of war stories mixed up with Robbie Turner's, as I was reading it at the same time I read McEwan's far superior Atonement. It's about the March father, while he's a minister and not present in Little Women, Brooks tried to base him vaguely off of Alcott's father.
Theme: War, and abolishion. John Brown is mentioned, as a friend of the Marches before he was killed

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
I think this was the story of a dying old man, reminiscing about his life and his best friend's family. I was bored out of my skull and remember little about it. I think John Brown was mentioned.
Theme: Dying old man, possibly abolishion. And possibly John Brown.

The Known World, by Edward Jones
Again, I think this was the reminiscing of a dying old man. Could be wrong, the book bothered me. I think he was a recently freed slave, still struggling with the world. Possibly there was John Brown.
Theme: Racism, classism, dying old man

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
Rich privilidged people in New York. It's kind of like Gossip Girl, only classier and more grown up. And way better. Also, it ends with Archer all old, because you have to have an old man to win a Pulitzer.
Theme: problems of wealth and obligation, infidelity

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
This one was a bit nutty, and epic like only a Greek could do epic. It's the story of the Stephanides family, how a brother and sister got out of their town and and Greece in the midst of war and violence and got married on their way to America. It's then the story of their son falling in love with his first cousin, and going off to war, and then marrying her and having an hermaphrodite child. Told from the point of view of the hermaphrodite child, going into more sexual details about his grandparents and parents than one would think is normal. Cal is telling the story when around 50, and it's interspersed occasionally with the story of a blossoming romance, but the story mostly ends when Cal is about 15.
Theme: Imigrants, war, racism, incest, hermaphrotism

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Two cousins start writing fantastic comic books at the start of WWII. There is no incest. There are no old men. None of the main characters die. I have no idea how this book won the Pulitzer. John Brown isn't mentioned once. I guess World War II makes up for it.
Theme: Comics, war, art, family

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A collection of short stories, mostly about unhappy Indian immigrants.
Theme: Immigrants

Tinkers, by Paul Harding
An old man on his death bed reminisces about what his father told him while reminiscing on his death bed about his father. There is watch repair. It was...no good at all, and it being about at least two dying old men, it surprised me not at all it won the Pulitzer. I didn't finish.
Theme: dying old men, watch repair, epilepsy

The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham
Not actually a Pulitzer winner, nor fiction, but it was nominated for some book award, and the author is a friend of one of the women in my book group. It's a memoir, of sorts, a collection of thoughts and memories about a family where the father (of adult children with children of their own) killed himself, with no note, and with no warning bell signs for his family. It was beautifully written, if heartbreaking, and the author came to our book club. (Apparently she really liked us, we are the only group she has ever spoken with who were able to look at her book both as a personal revelation and as anovel.)
Theme: suicide, and it's consequences

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Tomboy growing up in the depression, fascinated by the boy who comes to town only during the summer and the crazy man in the house who occasionally leaves presents for the kids. Atticus, the most supremely good person possibly ever (at least in a Pulitzer book) is a father with an amazing moral compass and represents a black man accused of raping a white woman. It's fantastic. You've probably all read it.
Theme: The Great Depression, Racism, Childhood

American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
I am on page 50. It seems to be about an old man reminiscing about his life. I am sick of such books.

Of these books, the only ones I have particularly enjoyed are Kavalier and Clay, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Age of Innocence. I liked the middle of Middlesex, and appreciated the beauty of The Suicide Index, but it was intense and hard to read. That means that I really enjoyed one of the Pulitzers of the past twelve years. Many of the books (March, for example, or Gilead) felt like they were trying very hard to Be Classics, and that pisses me off. I don't like to feel like you are trying, and I don't like to see how hard you researched. You may be trying, you may have done fantastic amounts of research, but it should just slip in. (Atonement passes on both fronts.)

This is why I need a new book club. Julia, are we ready to start talking about our Fabulous Children's Book Book Club? _

Dear Pulitzer Committe:

There are interesting books that aren't about old mean reminiscing. Please start recognizing this fact. Maybe retroactively.

Thanks, love me. _

It's possible I wrote shorter papers for classes. _

The Hamlet Project
wherein I watch all the Hamlet movies available on Netflix
except the Russian one

I started this weekend, watching Olivier. (I will be doing these in order.) Olivier I liked, but the rest of the cast generally left me unmoved. Also, they had a tendancy to do most of the monologues as internal dialogue, rather than having him talk, which made vague sense when he was thinking one while in a room surrounded by people, but when he sat on the top of a tower and thought the To Be Or Not To Be speach, it felt odd. I tweeted a bunch while watching, and now I'm attempting to sum it up into a blog entry.

Horatio was there, because you can't have Hamlet without Horatio, but they barely interacted at all, he was just sort of this vague presence.

Rozencrantz and Guildernstern were missing completely, but I suppose they'd be easily cut, and without Stoppard's play as another force, their lack of presence isn't really noticed. The whole issue with Fortinbras was lifted entirely, of course, but Fortinbras is never in the movies. (Except of course for Brannaugh's uncut version, and for Ethan Hawke's late 90's corporate angst fest where he was the head of a rival corporation. I do actually like Hawke's.) Fortinbras wasn't there, so there was, of course, not the speech that ends "from this time forth let my thoughts be bloody if nothing else" which I rather like, possibly because it has an exotic feel to it, because it's almost never performed. However, as last words go, which is better:

"If thou didst ever hold me in they heart
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw they breath in pain
To tell my story"

or

"O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence."

I mean, really. "The rest is silence" is good, but the other is better. Of course, Hamlet has spent the earlier part of the play contemplating regicide and suicide, either one of which has a pretty likely end of death; he has probably been plotting his last words as well.

To be or not to be, the famous speech which is so well known that they don't perform it in The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged (once when I saw it, no one in the audience laughed while he was doing it, which of course is meant to happen so he will panic and run off the stage and one of the other's does "What piece of work is man." I sat there and considered taking pity on the poor actors and laughing, but I was intensely curious about what would happen if no one laughed. Turns out he just panics and runs off the stage) was performed, as it often is, with Hamlet alone considering death. It's right before Ophelia returns the gifts he gave, while the King and Polonius hide behind a curtain (or whatever). He has an audience. I am only convinced that he has had any suicidal tendancies because in another speech he has the line about if only god were not fixed against self slaughter. I wonder if anyone gives him an audience in any of the movies. Hm. Well, I will find out, that is the point.

I feel like one of my favorite speeches was missing (besides the one I mentioned earlier) but I can't remember which. Perhaps it was the What Piece of Work is Man.

I didn't like this Ophelia, really. She had no spine, she just did meekly as she was bid and cried and went unconvincingly mad and died. I often want Ophelia and Horatio to run off together, which of course they never do (they might in the YA novel about Ophelia that I flipped through at the Coop one day), but this was such a non-existant Horatio, and such a dull Ophelia...

Hamlet's relationship with his mother was...odd. I felt like the director knew that there were people who read Oedipal messages into the play, and so they had her kiss him on the lips more than a mother usually would, but it always felt strange, and not in a weird incestuous way, just a weird we don't know what to do with this idea sort of way.

Next up: Richard Burton. I will probably watch next weekend. _

I bought a cute new pair of Crocs, as mine were wearing thin, and I love them in the summer. I went down a size, because my last ones were too big. They were pinching my toes, so I threw them in the dryer to stretch them out. And I stretched them too far, so now I have to figure out how to shirnk them. ((sigh)) _

Now, it's not as though I didn't know that Ben Affleck and Jon Hamm were filming some cop movie thing in Charlestown when I lived there, of course I did, they kept closing roads for filming. But, really, guys? Charlestown didn't seem nearly as slummy as it does in The Town. Did I miss something? Is this new movie meant to be a period piece? _

One of the things I love about Leverage is that the creators know who Hardison's favorite Doctor is. And that at one point in writing they apparently turned to each other and said something like "so, Elliot and Parker are like Wolverine and Kitty."

I adore Hardison's geekiness, and how it's not crippling like it is for the guys on The Big Bang Theory. Really, Hardison is my favorite. And Parker. They are so cute. _

This has been amusing me all morning. The most amusing result of all, though, was Mark Twain when I put in Hamlet's famous soliloquy. _

People watching, on the subway, in the middle of weeks of 90 degree heat. It seems like more than half of the women wear skirts, usually about knee length. They look like normal professional women in summer. They wear short sleeves. Some wear capris, and that works fine. All the men are in long pants, and often long sleeved shirts, because there is nothing that men are allowed to wear to work that looks professional that's not long pants. I feel bad for them, as I look down at my own knee length skirt. _