View toward bridge to Lido Key

Potpourri: Viewing & Reading

VIEWING OPTIONS

From New Zealand to Australia to Spain, I’ve been traveling the world in my recent TV viewing.  It’s marvelous to have so many new series from which to choose.

The Sounds (Acorn)

The Sounds is an adventure tale. It’s set in the fiords off New Zealand’s South Island.  Doubtful Sound or the better-known Milford Sound are favorite tourist destinations.  On a day-long or overnight cruise, one can go deep into a fiord and experience the eeriness of almost complete silence. 

If you read the comments on Facebook when considering this 8-part series, you might not watch it.  Is it plausible? Is Maggie a convincing character?  Nonetheless, the Chief Penguin and I watched it separately and found it consuming enough to keep us on the treadmill.

The Cabbotts (deadline.com)

Tom and Maggie Cabbott are escaping life in Canada and starting a sustainable fishery in the small town of Pelorus.  Tom is the black sheep in a wealthy family and goes ahead to set things up.  When Maggie arrives, there is immediate disgruntlement from a native woman, and it seems Tom has not filled in all the requisite boxes.  The next day he disappears in his kayak and a massive search effort begins.  

What are Tom and Maggie really planning?  What are police chief Jack’s festering secrets?  What is Zoe, Jack’s daughter, up to, and why is Pania so riled up?  Past crimes, suspicion, and big money are all intermixed in this complex stew of relationships. I recommend giving The Sounds a try.

Flesh and Blood (PBS Masterpiece)
Mary, Mark, Vivien and her children (radiotimes.com)

Flesh and Blood is full of tangled emotions, secrets, and surprises.  When their widowed mother, Vivien, begins seeing Mark, a retired doctor, her three adult children are concerned, puzzled, and then upset.  They think the relationship is moving too quickly, and they have questions about Mark’s past.  But Vivien’s offspring have relationship issues of their own from infidelity to lack of trust to secret affairs.  Add in nosy, but from her view, well-intentioned neighbor Mary, and it gets messy and threatens to explode.  Gripping with an unexpected ending!  Is it really the end or will there be a season 2?

Mystery Road (Amazon Prime)

This Mystery Road is a spin off from a movie of the same name, both starring Aaron Pederson.  Set in the Australian outback, the scenery is stunningly beautiful, a plus for a story that moves slowly.  Detective Jay Swan is dispatched to a small town to assist in the search for two missing young men.  Marley is an indigenous kid and rising football star while Reese is white and came from elsewhere to work on the cattle station.  Heading up the local police team is Emma James (played by Judy Davis), who co-owns the cattle station with her brother Tom.  As a Black cop, Jay is considered suspect by both the white and Black communities.  A man of extreme reserve, he and Emma work together to some extent, while he sometimes goes off pursuing leads on his own.  

(nytimes.com)

This first season is 8 episodes. In the beginning, it was so slow, I debated leaving it.  I persisted and then got caught up in the relationships between the various factions in the community. These are at least as important as the crime to be solved.  The concluding episodes are tense and exciting and worth the wait.   There is a season 2 which I have not watched.  Some reviewers bemoan the fact that Judy Davis is no longer in it.  (~JWFarrington)

SIBLINGS IN LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Book Club Notes—The Dutch House

My local book club had a lively discussion about The Dutch House, Ann Patchett’s latest novel.  I had read it back in February and then skimmed it for this meeting.  I enjoyed and appreciated it even more on the second round.  

The characters are richly developed and the sibling relationship between Danny and his older sister Maeve, the strongest and most critical one for both of them.  Maeve is the light around which this story, called a fairy tale by several reviewers, revolves.  She is sister, mother, guide and even goad (think medical school) to Danny.  They survive and thrive under the attention and care of the two women who ran their father’s household.  He was often absent, their mother abandoned them, and their stepmother threw them out.  It’s a carefully crafted novel with straightforward prose.  Still highly recommended!

The Wright Siblings—Maiden Flight

Recently, I commented here on the new novel about Katharine Wright, younger sister of Wilbur and Orville, entitled The Wright Sister.  Reading that work prompted me to read the earlier novel, Maiden Flight, by Harry Haskell.  It’s about Katharine’s late life love affair and marriage to Henry Haskell.  Author Haskell is the grandson of Henry Haskell and had access to letters and documents housed in several library collections. 

His approach is to alternate the relation of events in the voices of Katharine, Orville, and Henry, with the occasional interlude by another friend.  The voices are distinct and capture their personalities.  And his telling bears out Orville’s estrangement from the sister who was often viewed as a spouse in her care and attention to him.  Haskell also reinforces the complex triangle that was Katharine, Orville and Henry, and the delicacy with which Katharine approached each man.  This makes the novel worth reading, but it suffers from an excess of detail on some matters. An example is the long drawn out struggle to have the Wright brothers’ plane displayed at the Smithsonian.  Perhaps Mr. Haskell felt he had to include every bit of information in his source material.  

Like Danny and Maeve in The Dutch House, Orville’s most important relationship was with his sister (and for many years, hers with him). When Katharine married, Orville couldn’t forgive her and never saw her again until her death.

Note: Header photo is Sarasota Bay looking toward the bridge to Lido Key by JWFarrington.

Colorful red & green coleus

Tidy Tidbits: Immersion, Film & Books

VIEWING

UPLIFTING FILM

On the Basis of Sex (Amazon Prime)

Somehow, I missed seeing this film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early career when it was first released.  This week seemed the right time.  Based on RBG’s life, it isn’t a documentary, but a wonderfully satisfying success story.  First in her law school class at Harvard and first in her class at Columbia Law, Ruth was nonetheless turned down by law firm after law firm (after all, she was a woman, a Jew, and the wives of the lawyers in the firm would be jealous).  

She became a professor at Rutgers and, from that position, worked with her husband, Marty, and the ACLU to take on a case of discrimination against a man.  She won that case and others that followed gaining more rights for women.  She and Marty were a great team.  Not only did she enable him to complete law school, but he was wholly supportive of her career and her rise to Supreme Court Justice.  Highly recommended!

A side note.  I am of an age that I recall being asked at my first job interview after graduate school if I planned to have children.  The questioner was a man and I was married.  It was a personal and inappropriate question, but not illegal.  I made some sort of oblique answer and was offered the job.  I also clearly remember celebrating when, several years later, I could apply for a credit card in my name only, based on my credit history alone.  I was married and working fulltime and, I didn’t really need that department store card.   I got it more on principle than need!

CRIME SCENE

Van der Valk  (PBS Masterpiece)

(variety.com)

Since most of us aren’t traveling these days, and certainly not abroad, it’s refreshing to see a television series set in a city that is familiar from past visits or future forays.  Yorkshire for DCI Banks, Dublin for Acceptable Risk, and now Amsterdam for chief detective Piet Van der Valk and his somewhat scruffy team of colleagues.  The canals and the streets of Amsterdam, jammed with bicycles, bring back fond memories of a week we spent there five years ago.  

This three-part series is the latest remake based on mysteries by Nicholas Freeling.  The suspicious deaths are complex cases, often political, with a tangled web of connections between family members and suspects.  Unlike some of the other series I’ve watched, the Dutch seem to resort to guns more frequently.  

Commissaris Piet is a striking man with steely blue eyes, a blond thatch, and a very prominent jawline.  Usually serious, with seldom a smile, his eyes look haunted by past tragedy.  Living alone on a houseboat, he has a close relationship with Lucienne, his right-hand person, and while fair-minded, brooks no sloughing off by his colleagues.

READING

TIMELY MEMOIR

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

(vanityfair.com)

Losing a parent to an early death is an event that stays with one ever after; losing a parent to violence is another level of remembrance and anguish entirely.  A former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey has written a poignant memoir about her mother’s death more than 30 years ago. Trethewey was just 19.  Her mother didn’t just die; she was murdered by her second husband.   For years, Trethewey carried around a load of guilt.  

In this work, she details her childhood as the offspring of a white father and a black mother and how the experience of walking around with just one of them differed greatly in other people’s responses.  The racism and mistreatment that were rampant during her mother’s childhood and the vestiges that persisted in Trethewey’s own life form the backdrop for this tragic story.  It echoes many of the cases portrayed in No Visible Bruises, an award-winning book by Rachel Louise Snyder.  (~JWFarrington)

CRIME IN YORKSHIRE

Careless Love by Peter Robinson

This is a recent crime novel featuring DCI Alan Banks.  I’d read a bunch of them some years back, but after watching the DCI Banks TV series, decided to re-visit Robinson’s work on the page.  This one starts out a bit too slowly for my taste, but then picks up.  A young woman and an older man are each found dead and abandoned in suspicious circumstances.   Both are dressed up and there appears to be no link between them.  When a neighboring crime team presents the suspicious death of another young woman, the circle widens and the hunt for clues is on.  Both DS Winsome Jackson and DI Annie Cabbot feature in the investigation along with Zelda, Annie’s father’s companion who closely guards her tragic past.  Enjoyable, but I liked some of Robinson’s earlier books more.

Note: Header photo is Florida fall foliage: colorful coleus.

pink hibiscus flowers

Tidy Tidbits: Escaping in Place

BINGEING ON CRIME

DCI Banks (Amazon Prime)

This detective series is a BBC production from several years ago.  I think it is excellent.  Alan Banks is a middle-aged chief inspector in Yorkshire with a dour demeanor and a sometimes-sour look.  You’d think he’d be hardnosed, but underneath that façade, he is compassionate toward victims and diplomatic when necessary.  Yet, he drives his team forcefully in the hunt for any killer.  His primary colleagues are two women:  DS Annie Cabbot, a smart energetic individual who’s in love with Banks, and DI Helen Morton, a by-the-book precise person dealing with complexities in her own life.  

Banks with Helen Morton & Annie Cabbot (imbd.com)

 Each case is over two episodes.  The cases are complicated with multiple threads which is what makes them engaging.  There are crime scenes, but they are not overly gruesome.   The focus is on identifying suspects, following up links, and arriving at answers as to who killed a person and why.  The TV series is based on author Peter Robinson’s long running book series which now totals twenty-six titles.  Highly recommended!

The Fall (Netflix)

Set in Belfast, The Fall is a crime series about a serial killer and the detective from London who is brought in to oversee an earlier failed murder investigation.  Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson sees linkages between a much earlier murder and more recent ones, but they have no solid leads.  Paul Spector, the serial killer, is smart and ruthless.  He stalks young professional women and then breaks into their homes to do them in.  He leads a double life as a grief counselor and a married father of two young children.  Gibson is a complex character also, a sharp, high-ranking woman in a field dominated by men.  And the setting in Northern Ireland with its political issues adds another layer of tension.

What holds my interest is the police investigative work.  The enactments of the murders are graphic.  At this point, after four episodes of Season 1, I am ready to quit.  The pace is measured, the crime images troubling.  Although it received high praise as a psychological thriller, I don’t really recommend it, unless you are strong-hearted.  For those who are curious, there are three seasons.

CHANGE OF PACE READING

The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali

I stumbled upon a reference to this novel online and ordered it.  It is beautiful.   Set in Tehran in 1953 and in the Boston suburbs in 2013, it’s a love story.  But a love story marked by political upheaval, class distinctions, and the passage of time, decades even.  Roya and Bahman meet in a stationery shop in 1953 just before the coup that ousts the Iranian prime minister.  They are seventeen, passionate about one another, and eager to spend their lives together.  

With the political crisis, everything changes and Roya leaves Iran to attend college in California.  She marries Walter and has a mostly satisfactory life.  When she’s 77, an unexpected encounter opens a floodgate of memories and the chance to re-visit part of her past.  

Kamali has a delicate style. She weaves together strands of politics and Persian food and culture into a novel about parental love, familial obligations, and romance. For more information about Kamali’s childhood in Iran and her life in the States, follow the link on her name above.

MY STATIONERY SHOP

Like Roya and Bahman in the novel above, I too sought quietude, but no romance, in my local bookstore.  G. W. Ockenfels was located downtown.  They sold books, but also greeting cards and stationery.  It was a quiet shop, with a wooden floor and aisles with tall shelves as I recall, and the smell of paper and ink.   Mr. and Mrs. Ockenfels who owned and ran it were always welcoming.

I was in my teens, and didn’t have much spending money.  Customers were few and I could browse uninterrupted for long periods.  Over time, I became a regular, known to them by face and then by name. After I had selected and paid for a book, it was always carefully wrapped in pale blue paper and then meticulously tied up with very thin twine. 

In later years, Mr. O. became a bit confused.  He also began dispensing bear hugs that then were uncomfortable, but today might be reportable.  It was a sanctuary for me that became a little less so and then, as often happens in small towns, the Ockenfels went out of business.

Note: Header and book jacket photo ©JWFarrington.

View from Newagen to Hunting Island

Maine Time: Viewing & Reading

RECENT VIEWING

Soldier Father Son

This New York Times documentary is moving and extremely well crafted.  Brian Eisch is a single parent of Isaac and Joey and a career soldier fighting the war in Afghanistan.  When he sustains a serious leg injury, he returns home to a life very different from the one he had envisioned.  He’s in constant pain, can’t do the activities he’s always done with his sons, and his sense of manhood is diminished by this loss of physicality. Opening in 2010, the film follows Brian in Afghanistan through having part of his leg amputated and all the adjustments recovery requires. The intervening years bring new relationships (Brian’s girlfriend Maria) and unexpected grief, ending in 2019 when Isaac has transitioned from high school student to Army soldier. It presents a slice of life many of us have never experienced and is raw and tender and gritty. Highly recommended!

Endeavour (PBS Masterpiece)
Thursday & Morse

This is Season 7 of Endeavour.  Only three episodes in all, but each one is 90 minutes, and unlike previous seasons, they are all interconnected.  A series of murders on the canal towpath seem to have been successfully solved, but then another one occurs.  Morse has a new woman in his life and a budding friendship with a rich Italian.  He and Detective Thursday have their usual grumbles and disagreements, but this time Morse may have gone too far and caused a permanent rupture.  And we get a warmer, more relaxed side of Superintendent Bright in tender moments with his invalid wife. In each episode, we also have more of the private lives of the principals, adding to the richness of the series.  Recommended!

BEACH READ—SARASOTA SCENE

Footprints in the Sand by Mary Jane Clark (2013)

I believe I got an online offer for this Piper Donovan mystery.  It’s part of a 5-book series of Wedding Cake Mysteries, and not something I’d ever normally purchase.  I was probably lured by a cheap Kindle price and by the Sarasota/Siesta Key setting.

Siesta Key Beach (bestwesternsiestakey.com)

Protagonist Piper Donovan is an actor turned wedding cake baker who gets hired to make these fancy cakes in gorgeous locations.  She and her parents fly to Sarasota for her cousin Kathy’s wedding.  Kathy’s best friend is missing and then found dead. Thus, begins a whole series of murders.  Piper sticks her nose in foolishly and, with telephone advice from her FBI boyfriend Jack, attempts to help solve the mysteries.  

This is what’s called a cozy mystery, murders yes, but little in the way of gore or horror.  It’s light fare.  I enjoyed it as much for the Sarasota locales I know as for the Amish culture and characters Clark weaves in.  The Amish have a strong presence in Sarasota’s Pinecraft neighborhood each winter.   

BLOG HISTORY—STATISTICS

About a month before I retired in Summer 2014, I created Jots & Jaunts and wrote my first blog post.  That year, I produced 15 posts total.  In January 2015, I committed to writing a new post each week.   When traveling, especially internationally (those were the days!), I posted a new entry almost every day, thus creating an online journal for myself and others.  

Besides accounts of faraway places, blog topics include books, movies and TV, and the arts scene, as well as food and favorite restaurants.  The past five months have been challenging with no movies, no concerts or plays, and no restaurant dining—lots more content about reading and viewing.  

To date, I have published 396 posts with this one being #397.  That represents an average of 67 postings each year in the more than five years since 2015.  Besides the web, I share my blog on Facebook and with a select group of friends.  I enjoy and appreciate the feedback I get from my readers.  Thanks for your continued interest!

Maine rocks

Note: Header photo of water off Newagen and rock photo ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).