It’s only been in the past three years, since our daughter moved to Canada to attend university, that I’ve been avidly interest in the US/CDN exchange rate. A shift of a single penny adds up to hundreds of dollars per year in variation in tuition/living expenses. I was a little dismayed when the loonie crested $1.10 last week. The experts were saying that it could keep rising, to $1.15 or $1.25. Faced with the dilemma of whether to transfer some money at $1.10 in anticipation of a continued rise or gamble that the bubble would burst, I stood my ground. And today it’s down to $1.0365. When does it bottom out and go back up again? Gee, I wish my crystal ball would tell me.
After a lengthy hiatus from reading, I finally picked up Fatal Revenant again, the second book in the final Thomas Covenant chronicles. I actually made it all the way to the end of Part I. A terrific resolution to the storyline that I didn’t see coming. Can’t wait to read the rest of the book.
We watched Evening this weekend, the film version of Susan Minot’s novel. The film stars Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Glen Close, Toni Collette, Natasha Richardson and Meryl Streep, along with Streep’s daughter playing the same character fifty years earlier. (The resemblance is eerie—my wife guessed that it had to be her daughter long before we were sure that was the case. Her stage name is Mamie Gummer.) The film had a bit of a Great Gatsby feel to it, and it was about the mistakes in peoples’ lives and what things are truly meaningful at the end of days. Redgrave is the dying version of Claire Danes, who is in Newport, RI to attend her friend’s wedding at some unspecified date after the Korean war, probably the late 1950s. We enjoyed the film, but felt that Danes seemed like an anachronism. She didn’t meld into the era, and her delivery seemed theatrical. Redgrave is brilliant, though, as the feisty woman who can do nothing but spend her dying days dwelling on the past and coming to conclusions. Collette and Richardson are her daughters, one “successful,” the other less so, depending on one’s definition of success. We had some symbolism questions at the end (what was the big deal about not going sailing and the shots of the defunct sailboat?) but felt it was worth watching for the scene between Streep and Redgrave alone. I’d give it 7.5 out of 10.
The only writing I did this weekend was to pen the first draft of my upcoming Storytellers Unplugged essay. It’s called “For Love or Money,” and is a riff on the essay I have in On Writing Horror, a case study in almost shooting myself in the foot by aiming low, inspired by my recent sale to EQMM and the origins of the story that I sold. I feel like I’m charging up my batteries for the novel I’m going to start any day now.
