I woke up very late; Mama was phoning with my uncle B., and I find it very comfortable to hear people talking when I'm lying down and half-asleep (but not because I want to eavesdrop on the conversation). Then I played the piano for hours; the Chopin pieces went very well, so did Mozart, and the parts of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I), which I played for the first time in months. I searched for Tchaikovsky's Seasons again (I often played them during my second year at UBC) but they seem to have vanished entirely. I also continued reading A Knight of the Nineteenth Century.
Papa is reading to Mama from a book by Sir Peter Ustinov now. Before that they began to watch a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic at the Waldhütte, with its cheerful rendition of a piece by a Spanish composer. The white double-peaked concert tent, the masses of people arranged into bright rows, and the softer dark green of the trees formed a nice scene. J. is working away at his German poster, and Mama helped him. Fortunately there was no Spanish homework this weekend. (c:
I've begun my Friedrich story, and it is coming together nicely. It is, after all, a case of writing about what I know. As the story begins, Friedrich is reading the newspaper on a hot July day. He interrupts his reading in order to clean up his apartment and go grocery-shopping. (The story will be interesting later.) I'll figure out the central plot as I go along. The story should become as realistic as possible, but I want to write it from a sympathetic but detached perspective, and, while I don't mind being open about my own life, I don't want to write too much about the lives of everyone around me. So, for example, I don't know whether I should write about Friedrich's father losing/quitting his job, even though it would be for different reasons and in a different context than in Papa's case.
But the peculiar thing is that my French-student-story, which is the prototype of this story, anticipated some of my real life since I began to write it. The father did lose (or rather quit) his job, the family moved into an apartment, someone in the family got a job working in a cafeteria (Mama did it in real life, but I was thinking about having François do so in the story), and the eldest child (François in the story, and me in real life) felt pressured by circumstances to get a job to help support the family (the difference being that François would actually have gotten the job). At least, therefore, the story was quite realistic.
As for my other stories, I did continue my French Revolution tale when I was at the Rathaus on Friday (where, by the way, I could only get certified copies of my German documents, so I have a whole new round of bureaucratic acrobatics ahead of me). The great-aunt, who had already arrived in her carriage from France, is about to tell the news of Paris. The youngest d'Eules child, Pierre, had slipped into the Méran River, and now he is being cared for by Mme. d'Eules. It strikes me now that the heroine Geneviève should be cared for, too, because she went into the water to fish her brother out. I'll have to change or add other things too. The great-aunt, Mlle. de Laurèges, should have a lapdog -- Maltese, perhaps. Her good-natured but silly and gushing companion (a weak imitation of a "précieuse ridicule") will resemble a lady in an English painting in the Gemäldegallerie, the pained-looking one with a neck-ribbon that looks like a collar. Anyway, I really need to rewrite what I have, and need still more to continue the research.
Now Papa and Mama are watching another crime television show, probably Monk. When the voices sound twice as fake as normal, as they did just now, it usually means that the show is dubbed. Speaking of dubbed crime shows, yesterday evening we watched part of Death on the Nile with David Suchet as Poirot. I don't get why people had to make that film again; I think that the one with Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow and Simon MacCorkindale was much, much better. I'll admit that I only watched a few minutes of the new version, but I'll criticize it anyway: First of all, there was a disagreeable flippancy and staginess. There is usually a satiric element in Agatha Christie adaptations, and a "campy" element too, but here the satire was leaden and the campiness far too broad. The characters were utterly stereotyped, and murder treated essentially as comedy. I think that in the Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney there is a certain exhilaration because there are so many strong actors playing strong roles, but it is kept in dignified bounds. In the old Death on the Nile there was humour, too, like the character of Salome Otterbourne, but it was also kept in bounds. In this Death on the Nile there was just silliness that arose from playing exaggerated characters and from dressing up and pretending to play someone from the past in an exciting context. It also contrasted to the best years of the Poirot television series, in which I particularly admire the seriousness, and the way that the actors are wholly submerged in their characters. And the music was appropriate, but consistently middling in quality and expressionlessly played. Altogether, though I know this sounds terribly snobby, it seems as if it were an American film.
Anyway, I guess I'm working off my pent-up aggression against period films that just don't get it. Of course it isn't only an American phenomenon. The British are equally capable of doing their cultural history an utter disservice, and I've seen the Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Jane Eyre adaptations to prove it -- besides, the film I've just criticized is a British production.
So, now I can get back to the Knight of the Nineteenth Century (who is converted, but who is not yet married off). (c: Here is a quotation that I copied out from the book: "If you will, you can still achieve a strong, noble character. [. . .] Heaven would ring with your praise, however unfriendly the world might be." I think it expresses the idea of self-reliance well -- which reminds me that I should finally read Emerson's essay on that subject. Perhaps it will change my presently invertebrate state. So I'll end with the opening quotation of that essay:
Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
(Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune)
Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series
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