It's Everyone Else Who's Crazy, Judge Crater!
A recent event has forced me to wonder whether I'm really as nice as I think I am. I walk around Ann Arbor, with people not smiling back at me and chattering grimly into cellphones, and I occasionally feel much better that I'm being nice and they're not. But I'm starting to wonder if it's all a crock. I often blame life in this town for turning me into a misanthropic ass, but maybe I've been that way all along and the last two years have simply shown me the truth unadorned. Something to think about as I prepare for the Oirish hell that arrives tomorrow (mercifully, like Valentine's Day, it's only once a year).

In the meantime, I foolishly rely on movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to keep me sane. Peter Weir's masterpiece of repressed Victoriana helped pave the way for other films like Breaker Morant, Mad Max, and My Brilliant Career (all 1979) to put Australian cinema on the world map. Based on Joyce Lindsay's novel, which I intend to read, Picnic examines the turn-of-the-century disappearance of three schoolgirls and a governess at the natural landmark of Hanging Rock. It's quite the visual feast, with lots of pretty shots of nature (and schoolgirls lacing each others' corsets, drearily blatant phallic symbols, etc.) but doesn't really get going until the first half-hour is up. Once is does, though, it provides a smashing dissection of how the community around the girls' school falls apart in the wake of the incident, and a more general indictment of repression that would seem a little trite if not for Picnic's sheer visual beauty.

I also just finished Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country (1913). Taking, as she often did, the moneyed classes of New York for her subject, Wharton puts a merciless parvenu newcomer, Undine Spragg, into the mix of old and moneyed aristocracy and lets her rip through three husbands and the social fabric of two countries. Like Picnic, it's slow going for a bit but picks up towards the second half as it's clear Undine plans to leave no stone unturned in her quest for fortune and respectability. The ending's fantastic, but I won't give it away. As usual, Wharton's fiction hasn't dated very much.