A review of a review

The New Yorker reviewed Les Miserables.

Predictably, it hated it, like every other popular (read nerdy) film that has been produced in the last year or so.

I think it's full of shit. The review is trite, offhand, obsessed with making clever remarks, and gives the impression that the gentleman reviewer took a notepad with him to the theatre, allowed his Inner Editor to come to the fore, and spent the entire time scribbling clever remarks without really watching the film. The result is a disjointed mess that makes the gentleman appear utterly ignorant of French history and of literature as a general field.

As I've rather disagreed with the New Yorker in many respects, over many movies, I do not think that this is unreasonable partisanship on my part. Les Miserables is simply the most recent example, and one that I know very well indeed, as Victor Hugo's book was pretty much the first book I learned how to dissect in a properly literary manner.

The gentleman who wrote the review for the recent movie, on the other hand, shows a complete and startling ignorance of the source material. This is rather distressing; the New Yorker is supposed to be a magazine that is generally well-educated, and Les Miserables, no matter what certain people may have to say about adverbs, is one of the greatest works ever produced in any language, and a piece that even now contains relevant and revolutionary sentiments. It is a view of huge social movements and issues through the eyes of a few; it is a story of small secret deeds of courage and love in dark places; and of quiet deeds of evil in the light. It is a vast, grand allegory with its feet planted in the muck of the streets. So when our gentleman review complains that, "...you can't help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his [the director, Tom Hooper] sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever someone feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close..." it is clear that he has completely missed the point. He then bemoans the lack of farce, accusing Les Miserables of "inflationary bombast".

What Les Miserables is is of its time. It is a work produced in the nineteenth century, and trying to update it to fit a modern audience's exacting tastes would ruin its charm and beauty. A certain amount of pedantic preaching is to be expected -- do remember, dear reader, that a work published in this period was expected to have some moral material if it was not to be labeled sensationalist. Sensationalism was far more damning then than it is now -- a quick perusal of Little Women should substantiate this nicely. Les Miserables is, at its heart, a moral tract, much as many of Dickens's works are. A good reviewer takes note of these things, and does not complain about a work based on the fact that its content contains things that he finds uninteresting.

However, our gentleman reviewer does not spend much time discussing either. He is far too absorbed in his own cleverness to pay attention to such small things. He comments, concerning Valjean's 19 years in prison, "...a punishment that he regards as unjust, though in fact it reflects well on the status of French baking. Had he taken a croissant, it would have meant the guillotine..." Though a bit of lighthearted frippery such as this is perfectly appropriate in many contexts, given the rest of the article's complaints about 'inflationary bombast' and so on, it takes on the unfortunate and hopefully inaccurate air of a jest borne out of pure ignorance of both time period and source material.

 There is a pattern in this column. If the film reviewed is a small film, an unknown film, the reviewer sings its praises to the sky; if it is a popular film, it is dismissed with offhanded amused contempt. An action movie is called brainless and foolish; something like Les Miserables is damned as bloated and pretentious. It seems that the magazine has a fear of enjoying anything vulgar, which renders it more Victorian in sensibilities than even Hugo.

I wonder how many of the reviews featured in the New Yorker are genuine, and how many are the result of office politics. It seems that no reviewer can hold his or her or their position on those last two pages and allow themselves to be genuinely moved by the material they watched; in short, a reptilian heart seems to be a prerequisite. I do not want reptilian hearts to shape opinions about movies; I do not possess a reptilian heart, and I go to the cinema to enjoy myself. It is too expensive to do otherwise.

I would like to take the gentleman who wrote this review to the movies. I would like to sit him down with a bucket of well-buttered popcorn and a soda of a size illegal in New York in front of a screen playing some kids' movie and tell him to turn off the inner editor and enjoy himself. I fear this would not be enough to cure this cold, calculating view of entertainment, but it's worth a try.

A meditation on dishes

It is a well known fact that any new scientist spends an awful lot of time washing glassware. Indeed, "washing glassware" is a catch-all term to describe the work assigned to the newest person in the lab -- boring, repetitive, generally unattractive, and most importantly, very difficult to screw up. At this stage, the newbie spends a lot of time watching everyone else in the lab with varying degrees of envy, looking forward to the day when their competence will be recognized and they can move up to spawning urchins/counting glumes/keying insects and leave the sink far behind. 

I spent an hour and a half washing glassware today, and spent a lot of it wondering how in hell I'd managed to escape the task this long. It was all glassware that I'd produced, too, so there was a sort of poetic justice to it. 

Which was when I found that I couldn't turn the sink off. 

I did the big girl thing: I went and found my advisor and asked for help. The sink was fixed. 

As soon as my advisor was gone, it started gushing rusty water. Fortunately, we have a spigot with DI water, so that was not too much of a problem but I think the reader now has something of an idea of why I was so relieved when my friend called me up and suggested a picnic. 

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of said picnic, but it was glorious. We ate sandwiches with honey mustard, cheese, turkey and avocado and drank sparkling apple cider out of plastic champagne flutes on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. I may have a slight sunburn. 

There are a number of reasons that I'm going to find it difficult to leave this city for grad school. More glassware and fewer picnics... but I daresay I'll find a replacement!

...oops.

Keep a blog, they said.

It'll make you a better writer, they said.

Good for discipline, they said.

In defiance of everything 'they' have said, I appear to be just as undisciplined as ever. Which is fine with me! Except when I saw the little 'tropes and trilobites' bookmark in my browser every time I snuck some time on tumblr between exams last quarter, and then I felt guilty.

See, dear reader? I had pangs of conscience over this! I'm not entirely irresponsible in writing.

And to be honest, the irresponsibility here was a direct result of trying not to be irresponsible  elsewhere. I refer, of course, to my research. I applied for a grant (lots of tears involved), and got it, and had to make a poster (even more tears, never use Photoshop for ANYTHING important ever, got it?) and managed to display it and it all was very shiny and scientific and there were a lot of pictures like this:

And then there were a lot of other pictures of dissections of sharks and so on, because I finally sat down and took one of the labs offered by one of the most difficult professors at the college, and it completely ate my life. My housemates grew used to me pacing up and down the hall of our apartment muttering in Latin under my breath as I tried to memorize the nerves and circulatory system of a singularly odiferous dogfish.

After ten weeks of wailing and gnashing of pens, winter break started. To say that the beginning of it was less than peaceful would be like saying I was slightly vexed last quarter when the fire alarm went off the night before my eight am final while I was in the shower.

Unlike my inpromptu bathrobe fashion show, however, the beginning of winter break was productive. I finally got to go see the HMS Surprise.

Best Christmas present ever. I spent hours squeeing over her. We spent more time on her than in our hotel room. I was a happy puppy.

And then Les Miserables came out and I was an even happier puppy. Go see it if you haven't seen it already...

After that, this break has been one long blur of glorious sloth. I woke up at about 11 this morning, and realized exactly how useless I had been, and my conscience smote me. So I had to face the blog once more.

Sorry all!

I've been hiding in a hole a bit this summer. I will resume posts about the camping trip soon! Thanks for patience!

Trip, Night 2: North Bloomfield

We decided to go for the ghost town. After a long day, during which at least two semis tried to murder us and we got a spectauclar taste of the very worst of San Jose driving, (and Sacramento, and Grass Valley--it was like everyone on Interstate 80 decided to try smoking weed while driving), we arrived at Mallakoff Diggins State Historical Park.

Mallakoff Diggins was one of the largest hydraulic goldmines, before the massive environmental and economic damage the hydraulic mines wreaked led to them being banned. The above picture of the pit doesn't do it justice. In its heyday, the mine and the giant monitors (see below) that attended it would work around the clock. A thriving town grew up alongside it, North Bloomfield.

Originally written off as barren and dubbed 'Humbug' by disappointed miners, North Bloomfield remains today in pristine if uninhabited condition. (Well, mostly uninhabited. A few of the houses up there do have residents, just not permanent ones.

We arrived, made much of the town (look how tiny the saloon is!) and then headed out to the campground, where we were greeted by this sign.

We were now officially screwed. The drive up had been hell; actually getting to the park had required two hours or so to go ten miles over a steep, heavily potholed road. It was also heavily trafficked--there was a very popular little river on the way, and the locals were out in force.

It was looking like we'd have to go back to Grass Valley and get a hotel when we found a ranger. Turned out that they had little cabins for rent, restored versions of what the miners would have lived in. So we paid up and moved in.

 We were only intending to stay for one night.

Even after finding the metric ton of wasp nests in the cabin, we stayed for two.

We did a lot of hiking around. Above, my parents walk around the lake that supplied the water pressure to power the hydraulic monitors. Below, Dad is a great scale object for the tunnel leading into the mine itself. (It's a long tunnel and VERY cold--you could feel the chill from about where he's standing).

There was a little administrative barf with the reservation system, leading to someone else being very surprised to find us in the cabin they'd reserved, (fortunately, the other two were open, so it was settled with the maximum of good feelings and minimum of fuss, helped by the people in question being absolutely lovely) so we left after the second night, and headed up to Taber Mine and the water company of La Porte. 

Better late than never: The Trip, Day One

Without further ado, the trip.

Our first day of driving was easy; very little traffic, and nice temperatures. (The drive home was a totally different matter, but I get ahead of myself). The most interesting things that happened were a giant wasp in Dad's hair at the rest stop, and a large sign somewhere in the middle of nowhere advertising the virtue of cork corks over plastic corks.

We stayed in Coyote Lake campground our first night. It's a county park instead of a state park, and really rather nice--there were even showers. The showers were...interesting...but they were hot so none of us were inclined to complain. Unnervingly, the list of regulations for the camp did not list fine amounts. It listed bail amounts.

Don't mess with Santa Clara County, guys.

Here's the camp. My parents' tent is hiding behind the car, while mine lurks near the bear safe.

As soon as we got everything set up, Mom settled down to paint the view. It was a very quiet evening--we had a stirfry for dinner, cooked over the camp stove, and crawled off to bed at what was (for us) an obscenely early hour. A contributing factor was that we had not the slightest, hairiest clue what the hell we were doing the next day. We had two possibilites: head up to Santa Cruz and see giant trees, or cut across the San Joaquin Valley and head to Malakoff Diggins State Park, a ghost town some distance outside of Grass Valley and Nevada City.

Hello again!

I just got back from a two week camping trip. Expect this to turn into a travel blog for a few weeks--I have lots of pictures and silly experiences to share! Now just to get three memory cards of pictures sorted out...