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The Return of Reikitty

Things I know about permakitten Grace after being totally housebound the last two days. 1. She drags her three toys with her all over the house like a kid with her favorite stuffed animals. 2. She is deathly afraid of the sound of opening seltzer bottles. Carbonation is rather scary, I guess. 3. The reiki certification class that I took her to paid off. (The instructor said we could bring our pets.) She’s been doing paws-on healing all day by laying her tiny tiger limbs solemnly upon my inflamed back, reikitty style, and could teach Rademenes a thing or two. 4. Whenever she’s not attending to her invalid roomie, she’s stationed by the window, snooping on our neighbors who are snooping on everyone else. God, she’s such a Rosman girl.

Nurse Grace

Dorothy Parker once said, “Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.” This year that quote hits me with a double-burger level of irony: Upon posting the fattest check I’ve ever sent to the IRS, I doubled over in a back spasm and still haven’t been able to straighten without squawking. It’s hard to gracefully absorb the meaning of a physical metaphor when gritting your teeth with an ice pack and Old Testament levels of pain–but sometimes such an alarm clock is the only way the subconscious can get through to you. As usual, the first and foremost message is this: never take health and mobility for granted. Beyond that, as I ogle my ceiling and cancel my appointments, all I can say is: You’ve got my attention, universe. I am listening.

Chasing Green Lights (‘Gatsby’ on Film)

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hallowed classic about a self-made tycoon and his long-lost love. Like the green light famously tantalizing its protagonist, Gatsby has proven irresistible to filmmakers, who keep adapting it to the screen but never capture its allure. Why can’t cinema get this novel right? And, perhaps more intriguingly, why does it keep trying?

The answers may lie in the book itself. Published in 1925, it was initially deemed a failure, garnering mixed reviews and selling only 20,000 copies. Though now celebrated as The Great American Novel, it didn’t experience a resurgence until World War II, when it resonated with a nation clinging to its myths in the shadow of international threats. Fitzgerald himself was a bit like Jay Gatsby, dying in 1940 with a tarnished legacy that had to be restored by adherents not unlike narrator Nick Carraway. For that matter, the book itself–a reverie of furs, sleek cars, jazz, and prettily phrased quasi-revelations (reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope)–also could be described as a Jay Gatsby, a barrage of smoke and gilt-framed mirrors that buys so completely into its hype that we buy it as well. Excessive, earnest, and, yes, a tad hollow, Gatsby is a profoundly American story, with flaws–vanities as well as cardboard romances–that loom far larger on a big screen. But it is also the quintessential rags-to-riches tale, so it remains the stuff of which Hollywood dreams are made. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy