Belatedly I come across Peter Hitchens’s 2011 takedown on the then-new movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and it is a digressive, sometimes hilarious joy to read. Link here.

I’ve seen this film version many times—nearly as many times as I’ve watched the 1979 BBC series—and was always perplexed by the glorious miscasting of most characters, not to mention the complete reconceiving of such figures as Jerry Westerby, Peter Guillam (the film makes him a homosexual who wears a fringe and is played by an embarrassed-looking Benedict Cumberbatch), and of course George Smiley himself (Gary Oldman, who swims in ponds with his heavy eyeglasses on, which the relentlessly sedentary book Smiley and Alec Guinness portrayal would never do).

It didn’t occur to me till now that I was wasn’t the only one confused. There was outrage all over when the film came out.

And a lot of high-dudgeon humor. My favorite bit in the Hitchens review is where he tells you what Percy Alleline should be like, and is like in the book and TV series—versus the mutant-alien version we get in the film version:

This, THIS is Percy Alleline??

Percy Alleline, the smooth and pompous Secret Service Chief, cruises his way through Whitehall, associating with ‘golfers and Conservatives’,  speaking orotundly of ‘My brother in Christ, the Chief of Naval Intelligence’ (to give a sample of his speech).

He simply has to be tall, pin-striped and slightly well-padded, with the trace of an Edinburgh accent. Instead he is a short ginger baldie who sounds and looks as if he has recently given up being a Glasgow bus conductor.

Hitchens also tells us that Roger Lewis in the Times had just done a similar excoriation (though a much shorter one).  I see the paywall will defeat most people, so I’ll do the Christian thing here and reproduce the 2011 Lewis review in its entirety. Nyaah nyaah.

Am I the stupidest man in Britain ? I ask this because every critic has been lavishing high praise on the new film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. No one I’ve seen has given it less than five stars. The word “masterpiece” has been bandied about.

I thought it was absolutely terrible. As adapted, the story was something I couldn’t follow at all, and I’ve read John le Carré’s suspenseful novel of 1974 three times with intense enjoyment. Shot as if by candlelight, it was hard to make out the characters in the gloom. The plot was impenetrable, and given a vaguely gay slant — chaps smiling ruefully at other chaps is what it now seemed to come down to. The mood was boring in the extreme — the climax was Gary Oldman eating a Trebor mint.

The chief problem, for me at any rate, is that I am a besotted fan of the original Alec Guinness version for the BBC thirty years ago. I watch the DVD all the time. I even corresponded with David Cornwell — John le Carré to you — who told me that Bill Haydon was in part based on Anthony Blunt, hence the significance of the Corot painting he gives to Lady Anne. Blunt, however, with his immunity from prosecution deal, didn’t die until 1983; so back in the Seventies, to avoid legal entanglements, Haydon was instead said to have been inspired by Kim Philby.

Towering above everyone was the enigmatic Sir Alec Guinness as George Smiley. It was perhaps the best performance he ever gave, because it was a distillation of his technique as an actor. Ian Richardson told me that Guinness spent ages rehearsing how best to take off his glasses and give them a polish, how to tie up his shoelaces or tug at his earlobe. The more banal the gesture, the more riveting Guinness became — his apparent blankness suffused with regret, disappointment, rage and forbearance.

Oldman conveys none of this. I always have trouble with him as an actor because he looks as if he wants to bite people in the neck. His Smiley is sepulchral, a dead spot on the screen. His face is creased and lined and covered in chalk. His hair is a streaky grey. He is jerky and wiry, where Guinness sort of undulated. His voice, however, is an impersonation of Guinness’s.

No doubt the producers of the new version are cock-a-hoop and are busily planning the sequel, Smiley’s People. The only way they’d get me to see it is if they cast Hale and Pace. I’m not joking. I saw Hale and Pace in a thriller recently in Eastbourne and they were brilliant.

I went out to Seattle for a shitlord conference, and learned they have pot stores there. Now, I’ve never liked cannabis, really, but the idea of THC edibles appealed to me. On the flight out I’d read a piece in the New Yorker about a Jewish lady who’s some kind of gourmet cook and entrepreneur in that field. There is mention of Maureen Dowd’s unfortunate experience with a marijuana chocolate bar in Denver. She ate a bit, didn’t feel anything, so gobbled the whole thing. And spent the next two days in intense discomfort, flat on her back.

Thus apprised, and warned, I went over to the little shop in Belltown a few blocks from my hotel, and bought some 10mg THC milk chocolate for about five bucks. Nibbled a little, felt tired and woozy, lay down, got up, felt hungry. The munchies? Maybe. Went down to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. Two vodka martinis drowned out any of the drug’s effects.

I’d planned to bring most of the candy back to my husband. But when I got to the airport I had qualms. I gobbled the remainder of the chocolate and tossed the wrapper. After entering the security queue, I realized I’d thrown away my boarding pass as well. Back to the trash bin.

I’d nibbled at a little of the candy earlier in the day and could feel its effects. My mind wandered more than usual. My gate seemed miles off, but I had two hours, so stopped for a martini at the Alaska Lounge. When I got to the boarding gate listed on my pass, I settled in, and reached for my laptop. It wasn’t there, in my rolling backpack. I’d left it in the plastic x-ray bin at security.

Now the panic started. I realized I was pretty well blitzed from the candy, and had been all evening. I double-checked the departure time on the electronic board, since my flight wasn’t yet listed at the gate. The board said my flight was at N3; my boarding pass said C18. I checked it again. The flight was due to leave in a half-hour. I wouldn’t have time to retrieve my laptop. I hurried over to the N gates.

The N gates were in a different terminal. I had to walk a half-mile, then board a jitney. In the distant sub-terminal I saw my flight was scheduled at its new gate, but was slightly delayed. I had almost enough time to run back to security and find my laptop, but didn’t trust myself in my condition.

Finally arriving home next morning, I hunted through my bag to make doubly sure the laptop really wasn’t there. I lay in bed most of the next two days, exhausted from the trip and intoxications. It occurred to me the airport might have a lost-and-found department, and I found it online and registered my loss. After a few days I got a nice chirrupy voice phoning me. I identified the item easily enough (a Mickey Mouse bandaid over the camera, among other things). For $75 UPS will ship it to me in a few days.

My diary-keeping seems to have reached its zenith during 2008, that annus mirabilis, when just about everything worked terribly well for except work itself. I lost a long-time job and was seemingly unemployable afterwards. Early in the year, when I had been laid off but still had weeks and weeks of gardening-leave pay and benefits until the actual termination date, I didn’t do any job-hunting at all. I worked out daily and went to track meets, in Boston, New York, and Clermont-Ferrand. I archived all the graphic work I had done over the years, arranged several online portfolios, rewrote my resume several times, started many new blogs, tried to give my mess of a novel its final heave into organization, and otherwise tried to get my life sorted. I did not succeed but my efforts, as demonstrated in Diary 66D (January to July 2008), were brilliant. Well I’m impressed anyway, and that’s unusual for me.

One very useful project in the archive-and-organize venture was my cartoon-gag concordance. Over the years I’d roughed out cartoons, or written ideas for cartoons, or ideas for ideas for cartoons. Mostly these were in earlier volumes of my journals. On or about 11 February 2008 I “harvested” the most promising ones under the title Master Captions. Usually noted is a location for the original rough, a diary or scrap folder. Some of the descriptions are so skeletal they suggest neither humor nor sensicality, and I have to go back to the original notes to find what is supposed to be happening…

“We don’t actually believe in Santa Claus, but we regard him as a great prophet.” — Mother with child at Santa Claus queue.

“So who’s been telling you life is supposed to be interesting?”
“I see you’ve got those new slippery chairs.”
early ’04 – 59

“I never write on spec.” — Bum on park bench.
Amateur prizefighter. Book 49A
Willy the Worm. Book 49A, p. 29.
(See p. 20 – 40A for forced incongruities)

“to me, all women are either moppets or strumpets.” 49A

James Earl Jones. 49A p. 4

Fashion designer, harridan 49A

Judges — “Shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Learned Hand.” p. 93 62B, p. 22 62

“Devil I know” (bar) 62B
“Fresh fish” Tattoos 62B

“I work in IT so i don’t have to care how I look.” SCRAP (bums on p b)
“You look kinda old for a ‘Josh.’ – SCRAP
“You have a skill set? You mean you can buy a whole set?” SCRAP

WHAT WOULD NAPOLEON DO? – SCRAP

Give me six vodka gimlets and I care not who makes the laws (barfly an E H Shepard king) – SCRAP

Hi Honey I’m Elwied (???) SCRAP

You must be Aladdin. You have such swell legs. SCRAP

BULLFROG’S MONOPOLY – scrap – just an idea

Unsex Toilet 37, book 53

L’esprit d’escalator (Rego, 2000)

And for dessert may I suggest a cognac, served up w/ nicotine gum? p. 60 Book 65

(buffalo gals) Book 62 p 22

“There’s a gentleman here to see you.” (slattern secretary, schlump boss, Knut w/ cane)

Two cats at restaurant table: ‘Basicaly I’m an ovo-lacto vegetarian, but I also eat mice.’ p. 59 Book 62

Naturopath store. “This one doesn’t do anything either but it’s three dollars cheaper.”
“They threw me off the hay truck around noon.” p. 42A [Drunken man arrives home?]

TBC

Wrote my first Wikipedia article in a long time today. It is about Ion Trewin, literary director of the Booker Prize and author of the Alan Clark biography. Believe it or not there was no article for him!

I used a Most Favored Alias when writing the article, naturally.

Both Ion and his literary agent son Simon have simple WordPress sites, using a standard Chris Pearson theme. Good to know.

In which our editrix showers us with sparkling reminiscences and investigates the roots of our technological decline.

When I was a little girl (she wrote), fireworks were almost as boring as they are now, but they went on a lot longer. I mean the season went on a lot longer. It started around Memorial Day and pretty much lasted through the whole lightning bug time.

You saw the most fireworks on Independence Day, of course (of course), but when you drove through Kentucky or Tennessee in mid-July you’d still see the little ma-and-pa shops with their charming homespun billboards, and they were doing a land-office business. And they weren’t just getting rid of inventory (like Russell Stover Candies with their post-Valentine’s Day half-price heart-shaped boxes of chocolates) either. No no no! You see, they had all these obscure celebrations down in Chattanooga and Chickasaw Bluffs and Stone Mountain, running clear into August. Every weekend through the South, it was like Disneyland After Dark, only without Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.

In general, fireworks displays were much more spectacular than they are now. The first five minutes were the same stuff you get now: a series of roman candles with a shower of stars. That was just the warmup; they were sampling the inventory for dampness and duds.

Then the magic happened. A blast of blue stars and a blast of grey stars would face off against each other, and as they descended they’d subtly form themselves into the silhouettes of Civil War detachments with bayonets fixed toward each other. That image would drop away, to be replaced by all manner of heroic images (depending on your locale): the Liberty Bell, Stonewall Jackson, Barbara Fritchie.

Near Jacksonville, Florida, the pyrotechnicians were sponsored by the local alligator farm and Studebaker dealer. Come fireworks night, their piece de resistance was a vast crocodilian in green-and-gold, with spiffy white Avanti cars driving into the gator’s red mouth and out its tail. The gator’s eyes bulged and flashed different colors: orange, pink, chartreuse, before exploding into a black hole.

This spectacular vision hovered in the air a second more, then dissolved. We moved on to the finale: a white-on-white bust of George Washington with googly eyes, and a Betsy Ross flag rippling in a pyrotechnical breeze.

Most big fireworks shows ended that way: some combination of Washington and the Stars and Stripes. They weren’t all well done, I must say. Often, if you didn’t know it was George Washington, you might mistake the lopsided image for one of the bad ghosts in the Casper TV program. But the point I want to make here is that at least people had some basic skills and made the effort. You just don’t see that anymore.

What happened to our pyrotechnical know-how? As with so many things, the roots of our decline go back to the Second World War. Pyrotechnicians got tired of being as low-paid seasonal workers. They went to engineering school on the GI bill and started to build serious rockets and missiles in Huntsville and San Diego. Meantime the local fire and police departments took over the Fourth of July duties. Some of them knew the ancient lore of painting with sparks, but most didn’t, and couldn’t be bothered to learn. And since local ordinances kept most fireworks from the general public, there was no point in teaching pyrotechnics along with other arts and crafts at community colleges and day camps.

And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the sorry state we are in today. I doubt there is a single soul today who can do a decent alligator or Stonewall Jackson. And if there is such a personage, I fear he may be Asiatic.

Sunday: Devon has the baby shower at Kate’s. Kate does not like me, and has persuaded members of the Clique to act likewise, but they’re stuck. I’m invited, and the exclusion will be too obvious. There are lots of others in my situation; exclude us all and you don’t have a shower. I bring the most minimal gift(s), not diapers but pretty close, in nice wrapping. I leave the affair a little early, and D acts very sweet, tries to soothe me. She was abusive and insulting to me a couple of weeks back, and knows an apology is again in order, but she doesn’t do apologies, preferring just to act friendly, as though the cross words were never spoken by her. I wince a half-smile and go out the door.

Monday: To a skyscraper in Brooklyn, at least as much of a skyscraper as you can get in Brooklyn, for a job interview with the local department of education. Three men interview me in a tiny room. One of them thinks I have an English accent. I do not.  Outside I stroll around the downtown area, a dismaying slum that always promises to get better but never does.

Tuesday: Early in the morning, a sweet young lady downtown phones me about a web job at a local subsidiary of Macmillan. Oh I remember Nature…used to log it in at the Forestry Library. I tell her, you may certainly submit me for this position. Work among civilized people for a change, not the mutants and slobs in pharmaceutical ad agencies. What a lovely phone encounter…could it ever pay off? I think that’s asking too much of Fate. Recruiters phone me incessantly, often for the same damn jobs. They always want to talk your ears off on the telephone, ticking off facts about YOU, the victim, in a process that shouldn’t take five minutes but they prefer to stretch to twenty-five.  These are phone bullies, no doubt about it.  Us little forest creatures who are insufficiently overbearing and glib, we shall always be at their mercy. When I can, I flee to the library for peace…

Not today, though. Today I have two back-t0-back “phone screens” around noon and one. In the first, a couple of web techs from Reuters tell me about their revamped site, and don’t get around to asking me any substantive questions. They will have to ding me on account of my stammer, or just on general principle. Nice folks. Then a three-way conference call with these two Jewish girls in LA, who are quite eager to get me into one of those cutting-age interactive agencies, which here in town are invariably in the West 30s. Oboy but they are chatterboxes. Pleasant, and I am flattered that they dote over me, but the more they tell me about their client, the more I hate it. I am exhausted by the time we hang up forty-five minutes later.  It is a fiercely cold and rainy day, and I am not ready to face D again, so I skip the track races over at the stadium and do a long indoor workout at my gym downtown.

Wednesday: Battery of interviews with that interactive agency, the one the Jewish girls in LA were so eager about. It’s in Hell’s Kitchen (never a point in its favor), though the neighborhood is more salubrious than what I’ve seen at Draftfcb, which is pitched over the third-world hellhole of the Manhattan Mall, at 33rd and 6th. (At let us not forget downtown Brooklyn.) Two young senior developers interview me, and when the time comes to tech questions, I panic and go blank. Me, write a function? I can barely read three words in my condition. I do better with the next interviewer, but by then my goose is cooked and I am in a manic state of derangement. You can’t get me out of this scene fast enough.  I dread the afternoon’s interview, with some Indian in a big international banking firm. All these Indians! He better not ask me technical questions. As it happens, this is the nicest interview ever. My Indian is at sea, newly plucked out of his usual department to head up a new project. He asks my advice, what sort of software would be needed, what the usual procedure would be. I may have this job. I won’t know till the lead developer starts next week. He has to interview me too, but we’ll all be at sea, all three of us. So the only issue will be whether he likes me, or we can understand each other. Hope it’s an American, or at least a Caucasian.

Thursday: I get a rejection email from one recruiter, telling me that Thomson Reuters is taking a pass on me for the job. I assume that this is for the job I interviewed for on Tuesday. Later I realize that it’s a different job, through a different recruiter. Has Thomson Reuters rejected me tout court, or was I rejected only for this particular job, for which I recall nothing and never even made it to a phone-screen. Another recruiter contacts me in the morning about positions at WebMD. (WebMD is always looking for people. One of the reasons they’re always looking for people is that they have a very bad rep. They like to low-ball, bait-and-switch, invite the recruiters to get you interested for forty or fifty an hour, enough to get your interest, then when you’re ready to come aboard you hear from the recruiter that WebMD can’t pay that much anymore, and would you work for thirty? I’ve seen it go as low as $23.00. You can’t even get a colored girl to answer your phone for that, not through a temp agency or recruiting firm.) All the times I’ve been contacted about WebMD, and I’ve never made it to the front door. I think I had a nice phone interview once, though, almost two years ago… My recruiter and I never really connect on the phone. He’s one of those who must get you on the horn for a while before he’ll submit you for the job. I don’t get it, never will. WebMD and I will never meet face-to-face.

And the week is still young.

You don’t have to read this; it’s about a dream I just had. Your dreams are of interest only to yourself.

I got a job at the New York Times. I am not sure how this happened, but it appears I had some vague social friends there. Not my own friends, for the most part, but those of Mr. Ashley, my perennial penniless benefactor. The friends-of-friends are all folks with names like Bartle Bull and Monroe Denton. One of them lives in an old stone townhouse on the corner, somewhere in the East 40s or 50s. Riding home on my bike recently, I noticed there was a cocktail party/barbeque going on there, behind his wrought-iron garden rail.

It will be understood that my job at the Times was not really at the New York Times, but rather a phantasmagorical dream-Times, populated mostly by upper-class gentiles who wander the floors with whiskey sours and panatellas in hand. The men are large and wear tweed coats, like the real-life Monroe.

Anyway I show up at the job, and it feels like an ad agency. There are two types of people: the “creatives” who do the donkey-work and are surly and inarticulate, and the nice jolly account folks, who wander the floors and chat you up. Somebody has told the creatives that I am a great Creative person, a designer of some sort. They try to find work for me to do. I am assigned a blank dummy of a Style section, and told to rough out the layout. I ask to see past issues of the Style section, as well as some content. They give me one torn page and a couple of pictures. I sit down at a drafting table and start to draw lines with a non-repro-blue pencil. This is like a very very bad temp job.

One of the Ashley friends drops by and tells me not to sweat it. The layout work probably isn’t needed for a few days. Anyway, I should be writing and doing editorial work. “Even copyediting would be better than this!”

He hands me a list of article ideas and promises to square it with the powers that be. I tell him I saw him hanging out at his barbecue a few days before. He invites me out for a drink and introduces me to a few other swells. “Monroe, of course I know you. You are from Andersonville.”

Next day at work, my bosses in the “creative” den tell me that I am off the Style project, because I clearly don’t know what I am doing. They are assigning it to the freelancer Allison, who is very talented at finding places to stick pictures on a page. They reverently show me her portfolio. It is about the size of a scrapbook. Each page has a rectangular hole cut in it. These are examples of where to stick pictures. I laugh and snort with contempt.

In my pocket I have business cards from my contacts in editorial. I am sure they will be happy to see me.

EXEGESIS: If this a moral allegory, it is a very transparent one.

I was happy to see Grumpy Old Bookman found  it politically correct and twee.

Charles Shields […]

(Foregoing is an aborted draft from the end of 2009. CJS and I had a nice exchange of emails when he found my Amazon review.)

We were just getting acclimated to our new bungalow in Kinkajou Springs, and our new crop of Zoysia Grass (TM) promised to look a treat once the winter was over. Did you know Zoysia Grass turns brown after October 1? The guy in the ball cap who advertised Zoysia Grass on the back of the Sunday supplement for 45 years never let us in on that bit of information.

Anyway, the kids were getting settled in their new school (St. Vacance of Fonsonby’s) after many fits and starts. It took months for their new uniforms to arrive  (the only vendor is a Dark Satanic Mill some 40 miles away; it did a thriving business during the Battle of Gettysburg but has not upgraded its facilities since, save for a few bare electrical bulbs hanging from the ceiling) and now the children Fit Right In, no longer objects of wonder and ridicule as they wander the corridors in party dresses and shirtsleeves.

The children have also figured out the arcana of lunch. To wit: nobody buys the Hot Lunch except for the weirdoes who sit at the weirdo table over by the janitor’s closet. The done thing is to bring your lunch in a brown paper bag specially designed for the purpose. No re-used grocery bags or old cut-down Little Brown Bags from Bloomingdales.

For children in the third grade and below, lunch boxes are also permissible. However, they must be made of metal, not plastic, and if they carry the image of a television program or animated cartoon character, that character needs to be current–no Hopalong Cassidy or Ding Dong School lunchboxes, please. Oh, and they are not to be called lunch boxes. They are lunch “cans,” unless you are from Exdale Township and thereabouts, in which case you say “lunch kettle.” (I would love to know the origin of that!)

In the local twang,  the actual pronunciation of  “lunch can” comes out something like: lay-unch kee-yun. The children have been picking up this patois rapidly. You learn so quickly when you are young!

I mention all this so you’ll have some idea of how we have struggled to adjust these last few months.  And now here we are, forced to move again. Well perhaps “forced” is too strong a word. We were offered a better home, one where we could put down roots and own our own domain. Yes, presenttension.net suddenly became available, so we phoned the realtor and snapped it up. Even now we are still living in two–three!–places, unsorting our lives from the jumble of tea crates and wardrobe boxes we’ve been living in for what seems like an eternity.

Sallie, the youngest, tells me that the children hereabouts had no idea what she was talking about when she asked them what kind of layunch keeyun they carried. She seems to be very upset. Though we lived there for only a few months, Kinkajou Springs is the only home she remembers. Ah well, she will adjust in time!

(Postscript: In a later, expanded, version of this farce the town name was Kinkajou Springs. I did not realize till now that it hadn’t always been Kinkajou Springs. “Kinkajou” just doesn’t sound right. So I’ve amended it here. Aug. 31, 2016)