Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir lived from 1841 to 1919. His famous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le déjeuner des canotiers) was completed in 1881. Combining figures, still-life and landscape in one painting, it depicts a groups of Renoir’s friends relaxing on a balcony overlooking the Seine River in Chatou, France.
Dreaming (1928) by Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator who lived from 1870 to 1966. His painting Dreaming, which he completed in 1928, shows a young girl sitting underneath a tree beside a lake in a tranquil autumn setting.
The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) by Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau was a self-taught French painter who lived from 1844 to 1910. His 1897 painting The Sleeping Gypsy is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman with a full moon in the sky. It was a painting that was ignored for decades until it was justly recognized as a masterpiece in the 1920s.
Cradling Wheat (1938) by Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was one of a group of American artists who painted ordinary people in everyday settings. His 1938 painting Cradling Wheat shows three men and a boy harvesting grain. Their bent backs engaged in toil are echoed in the shape of the hills behind them and suggest a close relationship between the workers and their environment. The man on the left is using an old-fashioned cradling scythe, so the process of cutting wheat in this manner is called “cradling.”
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí was a Spanish surrealist painter who lived from 1904 to 1989. He often referred to his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” The Persistence of Memory is his most famous work and thought to be one of the greatest paintings of the twentieth century. The eyes of the figure in the painting are closed, suggesting that what’s being observed is a dream state, unseen by the natural eye.
Undermajordomo Minor ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
Undermajordomo Minor is a novel by Patrick DeWitt set in an unidentified and unidentifiable time and place. It might be a European country and it might not. The characters travel by train, but there is no mention of cars, electricity or any other modern convenience, so it’s a story that could have or might have taken place a long time ago. It’s set almost entirely in a castle, Castle Von Aux, that is owned by the absentee (at first) Baron and Baroness Von Aux. A seventeen-year-old boy, Lucien “Lucy” Minor, has left his not-very-loving home and traveled by train to Castle Von Aux to take up a position there as a servant. Since his job will entail many and multifarious duties, his title is to be “undermajordomo.” The “majordomo” (if there is one) under which Lucy will be employed is an odd gentleman named Mr. Olderglough, who has been at the castle for many years. Lucy finds out that his predecessor, a Mr. Broom, met an untimely end, but he doesn’t find out for the longest kind of time exactly what happened to Mr. Broom because nobody wants to talk about it.
In the squalid village down the mountain from Castle Von Aux, Lucy meets an odd old man (everybody in this book is odd) named Memel. Memel is a pickpocket and thief of sorts and he has a daughter named Klara, with whom Lucy falls in love. There’s just one problem with Klara, though. She has a boyfriend, an “exceptionally handsome” man named Adolphus. In the inexplicable war that rages in the hills around Castle Von Aux, Adolphus is an important player, a general or something. Adolphus is forceful and is everything that Lucy is not. He claims to love Klara and doesn’t like it that Lucy loves her, too.
At Castle Von Aux, Lucy becomes aware of an oddly deranged man who skulks about the castle at night, filthy and practically naked. Lucy believes at first that this might be the mysterious Mr. Broom but discovers in time that it is Baron Von Aux. When Mr. Olderglough receives word that the long-gone Baroness Von Aux is returning for a visit, it’s up to him and Lucy to take Baron Von Aux in hand, get him cleaned up, and make him seem as “normal” as possible. (This isn’t going to be easy.)
Baroness Von Aux arrives with much fanfare and Lucy sees that she is very beautiful. He learns, then, that Mr. Broom was in love with Baroness Von Aux and took his own life by throwing himself into the “Very Large Hole” up the mountain from the castle. Much to Lucy’s surprise, though, Baron Von Aux has undergone a transformation and is ever so much more presentable than he expected him to be. He can even speak and wear clothes. When Baron and Baroness Von Aux entertain out-of-town guests, the Duke and Duchess and the Count and Countess, Lucy witnesses the strange goings-on of the three couples in the ballroom, which includes a sort of free-for-all sex orgy. Considering what Lucy already knows about Baron and Baroness Von Aux, he can’t be too surprised at their behavior.
Eventually Lucy’s jealousy for Adolphus leads him to the thought of murder. He attempts to kill Adolphus by pushing him into the Very Large Hole, but Adolphus sidesteps him and Lucy falls in himself. He falls for a very long way but, since he lands in water, the fall doesn’t kill him. What he finds in the Very Large Hole is unexpected but makes absolute sense in light of what has gone before.
Undermajordomo Minor is quirky and thoroughly engaging reading. It takes us where we hadn’t expected to go, but when we’re there we find it’s a good place to be. Like The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt’s earlier novel, it is breezy, almost effortless, reading and goes down like Rocky Road ice cream.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Risen ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
Risen is a fictional story surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Joseph Fiennes, who doesn’t look much older now than he did in 1998 when he played Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love, plays a Roman tribune named Clavius. Clavius doesn’t seem to believe in much of anything except his own ambition. He’s present at the Crucifixion, and when he sees the suffering that occurs and the devotion of Jesus’s followers, something is stirred deep inside him. He looks long at the face of the man on the cross.
After Jesus’s body is entombed, the trouble seems to have ended for the Roman government, except that three days later the huge stone that was covering the entrance to the sepulcher is rolled away and the body is gone, leaving only the shroud that covered it. The guards who were supposed to be guarding the tomb were found to have been in a drunken stupor. The story that’s advanced is that Jesus’s followers stole the body and have it hidden somewhere to advance their own agenda. Pontius Pilate, in a tizzy over a visit by the Emperor that is supposed to take place in a few days, charges Clavius with finding the body of the man some call a king and thus ending the stories about him that are embarrassing to himself and the government.
Clavius doesn’t believe that anything supernatural has taken place. He admits that the one thing in the world that scares him the most is being wrong. He begins looking everywhere for the body of a 33-year-old man who has been crucified. His investigation leads eventually to the followers of Christ, those who call themselves the Disciples. He finds that these men are sincere and, although they can’t explain what they believe and what they have seen, they believe it wholeheartedly. When Clavius and some of his men burst in on a meeting of the Disciples, he finds sitting among them the living image of the man he saw die on the cross. He is mystified but has no explanation.
To satisfy his own curiosity, Clavius begins traveling with the Disciples. Christ appears to them miraculously at times and Clavius witnesses firsthand some of his miracles, including the curing of an outcast leper. When Christ appears to the Disciples for the last time, he tells them to spread his message to every country in the world. After these events take place, Clavius, if not quite a believer, at least admits that he has been changed forever by what he has witnessed.
Risen is not for everybody, of course. Either you’re a believer, or you’re not. If you aren’t a believer, a movie isn’t going to change your mind. If you are a believer, no further explanation is needed.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp
The fluttery, husband-hunting Bennet sisters from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are back, but with one important element added: Now they are intrepid zombie killers, trained in the art of war. That doesn’t mean they’re not still on the lookout for suitable men (spurred on by their mother), but they are always at the ready to defend themselves, their homes and their England with sharp knives, guns, swords or whatever other weapons come to hand, from the dreaded zombie scourge. Welcome to the zombiefied, but still genteel, world of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was first a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also wrote Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter) and is now a movie.
It seems that zombies began to proliferate after a plague epidemic; the plague victims arose from the dead as zombies. How inconvenient that is for non-zombies, because the zombies eat the brains of humans—that’s how they become full-fledged zombies—and their goal is to turn all humans into zombies. Once a person is bitten, he has no other choice but to become a zombie and succumb to his desire to eat brains. (The “Zombie Apocalypse” is upon us!) Zombies are easy to kill, however, if you know how (have been trained) and have the proper weapons. There’s lots of zombie death in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but none of it is overly graphic. This movie doesn’t go in for squirting, splashing blood. The gore is restrained and the zombies are not like other zombies we’ve seen. They have parts of their faces missing and we can see the bones and tissue underneath. Pretty creepy but all part of the fun.
The two principal Bennet sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, are as pretty as Mr. Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley and George Wickham are handsome. Mr. Darcy is drawn to Elizabeth but she rejects him at first because she has been misled about him and believes he is something that he’s not. (These romantic complications will work themselves out in due course.) There’s something a little peculiar about Mr. Wickham, though (played by Jack Huston, who was so memorable as maimed World War I veteran Richard Harrow in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire). He is sympathetic toward the zombies and he advocates appeasement. He just might turn out to be the anti-Christ the zombie hoards are waiting for to lead them in the Zombie Apocalypse against the human race. This brewing war between good and evil is where we are left at the end of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If it generates enough revenue at the box office, there is certain to be a sequel.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
The Sisters Brothers ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt is a novel set in the American West in the 1850s. Eli and Charlie Sisters are hired guns (glorified errand boys) working for a powerful man in Oregon City known simply as “the Commodore.” The story is related in the first-person voice of Eli Sisters. Eli is more passive and inward-directed than his brother Charlie. He is sympathetic toward animals and doesn’t take very well to killing. Charlie, on the other hand, is an expert marksman and doesn’t mind killing whenever the occasion calls for it. Eli is on the fat side and has freckles. Although we aren’t told much about the way he looks, we get the impression that Charlie is better looking and has better luck with the ladies than Eli. Charlie is the leader and Eli the follower.
The Commodore has his panties in a bunch over what he refers to simply as “the formula,” which he doesn’t bother to explain to Eli and Charlie. He only tells them he wants the formula and he sends them to San Francisco to get it. He has previously sent a hireling known as Morris to get it, but Morris has apparently defected to the other side, as represented by one Hermann Kermit Warm, the inventor of the formula. Eli and Charlie have picaresque adventures as they travel from Oregon to California and, once they are in San Francisco and find Morris and Warm, they discover, through a “journal” left behind by Morris (how convenient!), what the formula is all about.
California has recently been gripped by gold rush fever. Thousands of people are flocking to the West with the hope of becoming rich. The prospectors who don’t extract the gold from the ground pan for it in mountain streams, a tedious pursuit, at best. The formula is a toxic mix of chemicals that, when poured into the river, cause the gold nuggets to “light up” in such a way that they can be easily extracted from the dirt and rock. There are some problems with the formula, however. The gold lights up for only about fifteen minutes, and the formula, when it comes into contact with human skin, is highly corrosive, causing painful, oozing blisters and serious injury.
Morris and Hermann Kermit Warm have a story of their own. When Morris was back in “civilization,” he was a perfumed “dandy,” rather effeminate and obviously gay, although that word is never used. He and Warm have discovered they are simpatico and have allied themselves with each other. It is an unusual “friendship” for the time and place. Although Eli and Charlie are supposed to kill Morris for the Commodore, they join up with Morris and Warm in an alliance that they believe will make them rich and independent of the Commodore.
The Sisters Brothers is a “noir western,” definitely on the dark side but with a touch of “gallows” humor. What happens to Eli’s horse, Tub, is not in the least funny; nor is the fate that befalls Morris and Warm or Charlie’s shooting hand. All in all, though, it’s a breezy and entertaining 325 pages. For the compulsive reader like me, it’s a compulsively readable novel.
Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp
Life Saving Patrol (1893) by Edward Moran
Edward Moran (1829-1901) was an American painter known mostly for his maritime paintings. His painting Life Saving Patrol shows a man on a moonlit night with a lantern and a small dog walking along the beach looking out to sea. Although the moon is shining through the clouds, we get the impression there was a storm earlier and the man is looking for possible shipwrecks or victims of the storm.
Literary Fictions 