Lines I love (Part Three)

These are the ones that stay with me long after I've read the last page -previous ones here

Some lines are not just beautiful for the author's use of language and rhythm, but also for the bang-nail-right-on-the-head wisdom which resonates for ages afterwards, rattling noisily around in your head, like a butterfly in a room full of windows.

Infinitely wise:

'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. Once we know that life is difficult -once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.'

M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

Insightfully melancholy:

'Dust had replaced her'

Brigid O'Connor, Message in a Power's bottle

'Later on in life, you expect a bit of a rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did anyway. Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been.'

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Man Booker winner 2011)

Spine-chillingly atmospheric:

'So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.'

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

On an affair:

'Gillian noticed herself taking on his (her lover's) mannerisms - the way he put a palm to his forehead when thinking or clasped his hands and rubbed them together. She felt as though he was with her, even when he wasn't. She was surprised, and oddly offended, by how logistically easy adultery was turning out to be. Damien's (her husband) apparent obliviousness angered her.'

Molly McCloskey, Protection

Wildly psychedelic:

'Frida Kahlo likes to walk in colour, but she is hard pushed on Society Street. We wander together up Sarsfield Road; 'Where is all the yellow,' she asks, 'the red?' Frida, in a floral dress and Mexican silver, draws a tidings of magpies from the sky. She sings the reds of Sarsfield Road and they bleed into veins of the town, pulsing its grey.'

Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Frida Kahlo visits Ballinasloe, from The Juno Charm.

Have you some loved ones?

(Lines, that is)

Novel to Movie -Betrayal or Brilliance?

  
If, like me, you look for an accurate and faithful transfer to screen of a loved novel, then dollops of disappointment often await. My latest disappointment has been Breakfast at Tiffany's  - I know, I know, the movie is over fifty years old and I'm only watching it for the first time now.

The whitewashing of Truman Capote's  dark tale, of how far people will go for money, narrated by a co-resident who has a purely platonic relationship with heroine Holly Golightly, was mercilessly transmogrified into a sentimental, romantic movie that only barely resembled the novel. "Loosely Based" indeed.  However, a visit to http://www.newbridgesilverware.com/museum

(Okay, I wasn't supposed to take photos.)

gave a fresh perspective on the whole novel-to-movie thing.




In the making of Breakfast at Tiffany's, the casting of Audrey Hepburn in the lead role, led to the creation of a seminal icon.  Irrespective of the sanitising of the Capote's story, the movie in itself is an individual piece of art, a showcase vehicle for the glowing, screen-filling irridescence that is Hepburn's Holly Golightly.

The display of Hepburn's fab dresses and jewellery worn in the movie,


as well as the original 1961 zany, promotional poster,



lends the movie an entity of its own, distinctly apart from the novel.


 Perhaps the way to enjoy a loved novel to movie is to try and not have the written version hovering overhead, like a preying alter-ego but instead accept the new piece of art in whatever way it's been created.

It's hard, though.

Have you any novel to movie that's been a disappointment?

Laughter Yoga

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I headed  into a balmy, relaxed  Dublin city, on Sunday afternoon, for this

After a 'Miles of smiles' welcome from energetic and contagiously beaming leaders, Sharyn and Niall,

 twenty five of us launched into an hour of funny walks (a la Monty Python), pulling faces, skipping, lying on the floor with our feet in the air throwing a tantrum, vowel laughter ( ''A-A-A', 'E-E-E' 'O-O-O' ) and frequently throwing our arms in the air going "Yay."
 The main principle is that laughter is as effective when it's fake as when it's real - the same physical and emotional benefits occur. And if you didn't know, guffaws burn calories, lower blood pressure and improve creativity and memory.
 As I joined the circle of participants, my main worry was whether my feet smelled -we had removed our shoes to take part. Also, the concept of faking a wide smile at a stranger, clapping them on the back with a loud cackle or pulling a face while staring into their eyes did initially bring on a bit of   "I feel like a bit of a berk."

Those niggles melted away as the business of laughing loudly for an hour produced a high and as we finished up, Sharyn gave some exercises, or 'Free laughs' which can be practised at home in front of the mirror.

So, I'm off now to pull some faces and laugh out loud -O-O-O-E-E-E-A-A-A

A Clear Head for Writing.

I truly admire people who can write, no matter what.

Novelists, short story writers, poets et al, who despite the droning minutinae of day-to-day must-do's, apply the Kingsley Amis 'seat of the pants to the seat of the chair' dictum and belt out those words.

Forget background noise - J K Rowling penned the first of her classics in an

Edinburgh cafe.




or lack of me-time -plenty of mothers with young children are mightily prolific (you know who you are!)

For some of us, even with the luxury of a few hours a week to get those words onto paper or screen, it's the head-fill of jobs and general family matters that hijack the head, dampen ideas and thwart the flow.

How clear does your head have to be to write?

Can you write in the midst of chaos, be it physical noise or a head filled with distractions?

Madonna -Royal visit Number Two

Okay. Cosmetic surgeried to within an inch of her life, hanging shamelessly around with toy boys not much older than her daughter, and dogged by rumours that she mimes her concerts, could we ever really believe Madonna was going to act her age and fade away quietly, like any other fifty three years old, seasoned, well-lived, lady? For those of us who can't help but admire the general display of grit, cajones, balls, (or whatever you want to call it) the prospect of another chance to witness the Queen in action is proving irresistible.

 Especially as her 2004 visit

inspired
A Royal Visit which managed to get past the beady eye of Cliodhna Ni Anluain
Sunday Miscellany

And even though the thoughts of queuing and standing for hours on Tuesday night, 24th July, already has the sane person inside me going: "Mari, are you nuts, you're far too old for that stuff,"
the less sane person inside is going, "you're not the only one around here who doesn't act her age."

Luddites of the world unite

While it's obvious my Luddite leanings do not stretch to performing a Mickey Mouse type attack on the computer, (I'm using one right now, after all) , my 'grouchy-ould-wan' antennae shoot up when it comes to the choice between reading e-books and paper books. 

The concept of a swanky portable tablet upon which to read an array of novels, however convenient, still leaves me cold. And it's not just because the insanely, prolific Jodi Picoult had a good old fashioned rant against ebooks in the Sunday Times last Sunday - her income has reduced by 30% in the last year due to predominance of e-book sales.  Or even that author of the brilliant The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen  said:

"The technology I like is the ....paperback. I could spill water on it and it still works. So it's pretty good technology. And what's more it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It's a bad business model."

It's just that the e-book seems soulless, somehow. Is there anything more sensuous than the heady aroma of the pages of a new book?  Or the browsing around  a bookshop, where a surge of energy wafts from those masterpieces on the shelves?Oh and what about  George Robert Gissing
who said:
 " I know every book of mine by its smell and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things."






Call me what you will, but I don't think the paper book will ever become extinct. Not if there are enough Luddites around like me.

George Clooney and the Descendants

The yawning blue seas of Hawaii made a pleasant change from the non-stop rain in Kildare.

Director Alexander Payne  allowed the camera to linger patiently on the heart stopping scenery while presenting a movie, with an entirely Hawiian composed backing track (adapted from the novel by

Hawaii author Kaui Hart Hemmings) that made me laugh and shed tears in almost the same scene.
The ever watchable George Clooney  plays attorney, wealthy landowner and detached father and husband Matt King, whose world is turned upside down when his wife suffers a tragic boating accident. The story twists when Matt discovers his now comatose wife has been having an affair and he heads off, two daughters and a friend on tow, to track down the adulterer.
 Slapstick and sadness weave tightly.
 The adulterer (played by Matthew Lilliard) is also married, with a friendly, attractive wife and two gorgeous young sons. Lilliard's  changing facial expression, from beaming smile to eye-widened horror, when Matt introduces himself with the words "I think you knew my wife", sent the cinema audience into howls of laughter. Seconds later when King updates him on his wife's comatose, dying state, silence fell again.
The scene where Matt says a heartwrenching goodbye to his comatose wife elicited a chorus of sniffing along my seat just moments after him generating laughs from a wry one liner.  A night of rollercoasting emotions.
Some nuggets of wisdom too:
 George Clooney's 
character, Matt King, on being the inheritor of large tracts of valuable land and the importance of being careful how you spend your wealth:
"You give your children enough money to do something but not enough to do nothing."