It All Changed In an Instant & Not Quite What I was Planning by SMITH Magazine

I was very intrigued by the idea of the six word memoir. How do you tell the story of your life in six words or less? It seems impossible, even though Hemingway seems to have done pretty well at it. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn." ) Apparently, you can in fact tell a whole heck of a lot in 6 words.

SMITH Magazine gathered various 6 word memoirs written by famous and not-so-famous people in these two books (and I think there are a few more published) - Not Quite What I Was Planning and It All Changed in An Instant. I found them simple, devastating, hopeful, everything you expect in the story of a human being. I must admit my favorite is the title of the first book - "Not quite what I was planning." Sums up a life perfectly, and it's really left up to the reader to determine if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"I still make coffee for two."

"So would you believe me anyway?" —James Frey

Joan Rivers, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Sedaris, and more contribute. It's really a quite lovely read, but I found it such that I couldn't read more than a few at once before it felt too trite. I am intrigued on what my 6 word memoir would be. I should think on that.

Rating: 4 Purrrs

Recent Acquisitions to the Library

My latest haul from Quality Paperback Books:

• An Incomplete Revenge: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear - I love these mysteries. 
• Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by Rachel Fershleiser - This sounded so intriguing.
• Monster, 1959 by David Maine - A monster from the 50's comes to life. 
• Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield - I hear this one is a tear-jerker. 
• Obedience: A Novel by Will Lavender - A prof tells his students that their assignment is to save the girl he's got trapped somewhere by the end of the semester.
• The Vicious Circle: Mystery and Crime Stories by Members of the Algonquin Round Table by Otto Penzler - An anthology of mysteries from those sharp-tongued members of the Round Table.
• Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights by Robert Schnakenberg - I love this series of books. 
• The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin - The second in the series of medieval CSI. 
  

Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes by Emily Craig PhD.

I found Teasing Secrets from the Dead while digging through the stack of true crime books at Half-Price books. When I saw that Kathy Reichs, writer of the Temperance Brennan books and forensic anthropologist herself, wrote an introduction to this book, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. It wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed paying full price for it.

Emily Craig started out as a medical artist, drawing detailed anatomy pictures for a medical laboratory. She describes how that interest led her to switch her career path to forensic anthropology, and gives you a short section on how her training and study went. She describes the difficulty of marrying fact and intuition, of the long hours of study, and of the differences in forensic anthropology and forensic pathology. Later she describes her work as a full-time employee in Kentucky, and they types of work she does there identifying remains most often found in the back country areas. She is candid about the difficulties of matching remains with missing persons, and definitely rips those CSI blinders off. It’s a lot harder to do this job than TV might make you think. It’s gruesome work, so I don’t recommend eating while you read.

Craig’s tale becomes really interesting when she gets into the chapters on the Branch Davidians in Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center attacks. In Waco, she is the scientist who reconstructed David Koresh’s skull, and before that, the one who reconstructed the skull that showed not all the cult members died because of the fire (she found evidence of a bullet hole). In OKC, she helped rebut claims that the real bomber died in the explosion by identifying that the true owner of an extra severed limb did in fact belong to a victim who was inside the building. Her chapter on the World Trade Center was devastating and emotional, and you can tell the difficulties faced by those workers will never be truly understood by anyone not there to share their burdens. In fact, it is the one chapter where it doesn’t feel like Dr. Craig is bragging.

That is the one thing I had an issue with when reading this book. Dr. Craig’s tone was almost condescending and self-involved, especially when describing the “intuition” side of things. Another thing that was not fun to read– the constant descriptions of maggots. Seriously, yuck. Other than that, it was interesting to get a factual account of how someone becomes a forensic anthropologist and the difficulty of being in that profession.

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs

Marie Antoinette

I love Sophia Coppola's previous work. The Virgin Suicides was just beautiful and a near perfect interpretation of the lyrical novel. Lost in Translation was a vision of a story , making the viewer a part of a newly formed friendship in a strange place. Her visuals made Japan a postcard that I wanted to visit, even though I felt the alienation of the main characters. Marie Antoinette was a visual feast much like Sophia Coppola's other movies, but while I loved the movie, I didn’t get the charm and the haunting, staying power of her other films.

Coppola used Antonia Fraser’s biography of the fated queen, which I hread after seeing the film, but from what I understand it is a much more generous interpretation of Marie’s life than some might give. The story is well told, but focuses mostly on the young queen’s life and her early years at court before her first children were born. You feel the alienation and the confusion the young Dauphine feels when she first enters Versailles, and you fear the intricate court politics that she must maneuver to survive. You feel sorry for this girl who is married off for the good of her people and is under pressure from all around her to fulfill her conjugal duties when the Dauphin is indifferent and every move she makes is gossiped about and scrutinized. When you get to the later years of her life, Coppola moves quickly to the end, but you also see the point Fraser and in turn, Coppola is trying to make: Marie Antoinette was maligned by the public at large, and while her excesses were problematic, she also was only a small piece of the puzzle. While most would lay the blame for the revolution at her feet, you see here the more human side of the woman with ships in her hair.

The movie is a like a big piece of intricately frosted cake, and of course you get the heavy 80’s influence you tasted in the trailer. The costuming is beautiful, with no detail left undone. The colors of the costumes are bright pinks, blues, greens, and yellows that could be more frou-frou versions of the neon teens would wear in the height of the big hair era. Even the food follows this color scheme. I thought this fit rather well with Coppola's comparison of the court at Versailles and the opulence that was the Reagan years. The only thing that didn’t fit was some of the music. Coppalla used a mix of traditional and retro tunes that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. The music fit really well during some of the shopping and ball scenes but the one point I really felt didn’t work was the song used when Marie and her entourage return from a masked ball in Paris. It kicked you right out of the moment. Not only was the song jarring, but it was a bad song.

There are many reasons you should see this film, but I can’t recommend it to everyone. Sophia Coppola has so much talent you can’t help but feel she is genetically encoded with good film-making genes. This would be a near perfect movie if it weren’t for the poor use of music in some places. It was beautiful, the actors were good in their roles, and the supporting cast was outstanding. However, if you are looking for a perfect interpretation of history with the soundtrack to match, you won’t find it here. Instead you will find a bright, independent, and inventive telling of a widely misunderstood person in history. This version of Marie Antoinette has guts and feelings, she’s no cardboard cutout or dry, unidentifiable woman who recklessly and uncaringly sends her country into revolution. I don’t know if it’s true, but I like it.

Rating: 4 ½ stars for such a beautiful feast for the eyes