I Can’t Remember by Nora Ephron

I’m getting a bit click-happy with my Kindle: a few days ago, upon seeing that Portia de Rossi’s memoir was the no. 1 bestseller, and reading the blurb, I instantly downloaded it to my Kindle and read Part 1 on the spot.

(Well, not that instantly, as I hadn’t used my Kindle in a month and I had misplaced it under a pile of ‘real’ books. I was souring on it, actually.

Today, I read the Nora Ephron interview on Salon.com where she is pitching her new book, a memoir and I bought it as well: but that book, I Remember Nothing, only comes out tomorrow. Instant Gratification Delayed, but I still have to finish de Rossi’s story.

Of course, I like Nora Ephron and When Harry Met Sally is my favourite romcom, well, tied with Bridget Jones’s Diary. And I just adored Julie and Julia which she directed. (Digression: yesterday, I watched Leap Year on the telly, as they say in the UK, with Amy Adams and Matthew Goode and I liked it even though it is a rather by-the-book romcom. It’s important you like the leads and hate the intended fiance, right? And I did. Great actors, really! And I felt sorry that Goode was so wasted as the sex kitten in A Single Man, although he made the most of it with his very few scenes.)

Hmm. Two memoirs of the celebrity type in two working days. I seldom read celebrity memoirs, although I read about them on the web. So this Kindle is turning me into a purchaser of such memoirs. Well, the interesting ones. Hmm. But I can’t lend them to anyone, so I am ambivalent about the Kindle format. I love lending books I love to friends. It’s like spreading the wealth.

Anyway, the Ephron interview, which is here touches on a Flo in the City theme.

Ephron is being asked about how hard it was to be a journalist in the 60′s, when few women are journalists of any stature. She states what I state right here on this blog: that just because there is ONE woman in any given profession, that doesn’t mean ANY WOMAN can easily enter that profession. That wasn’t the case in 1910, although everyone, including suffragists, seemed to believe it was. And that wasn’t the case for Ephon in the 1960′s, despite the fact her mom was a successful screenwriter and despite the fact that there were some other ‘role models’ out there. But as Nora points out, and I have been pointing out here in my blog: the exception is not the rule. In fact, Ephron says, the ‘exception’ can ruthlessly pit woman against woman for that one token post open to females.

That’s why I like Ephron, she has such common sense.

Social Media, Social Change, and Slippery Slopes

A still from D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, 1909, which I took from a public domain version on the Internet Archive.org. Here the rich wives of industrialists cavort while their husbands plot financial schemes which hit the poor where it hurts them the most, in the bread basket.

A while ago, I heard a BBC 4 interview with screenwriter Nora Ephron, who was publicizing her movie Julie and Julia (which I really enjoyed), a movie based on a blog, of all things, which still managed to be meaty, in more ways than one.

Anyway, Ephron, the daughter of movie screenwriters herself, said something quite remarkable, I think… She claimed that the movie medium wasn’t useful to promote social change, that it was ‘a visual medium’ and that all it persuaded people to do was (I think she said) purchase one brand of sunglasses over another.

It’s not that I am disagreeing with her, although, I’m sure many filmmakers would. In fact, I tend to agree with her. She supported her statement by asking (not an exact quote) How many anti-war films have there been made, and yet wars still happen.

This is certainly a topic for debate, hot debate. Does literature promote social change? Most people believe so, and they could point to Charles Dickens and any number of iconic authors. Yet, the point could be argued against as well. I mean, Brave New World, 1984, Kafka’s novels and Fahrenheit 451 are some seminal works predicting an ominous future for mankind (books we all read in school) and yet we continue to slide down the slippery slope they warned us about. (Actually, most books warn us about one fact: that history repeats itself. No writers see into the future, they just extrapolate.)

I watched the movie Network last night and was amazed at how prescient that movie was (is?). It’s about the corporatization (and de-fanging) of Network News and the rise of (cheap but compelling) Reality T.V. Forty years later, we are here, folks. Paddy Chayefsky, take a bow!

I tend to believe that it is technology that changes us the most; that the medium is the message, that what I am writing on this blog is less significant than the blog itself.

The fact that I was able to ‘capture’ an image from a D.W. Griffith film and post it at the top of the page is more significant than the fact that A Corner in Wheat is highly relevant with respect to the Nicholson Family experience, because it was the Wheat Boom era in Canada and because wheat was still very expensive, even for a middle class family, at $5.00 a barrel. And this supports my thesis: that the middle class is just the working class with more stuff and pretensions toward being upper class.

My story, Flo in the City (being written on this blog) about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 era, is based on the real life letters of www.tighsolas.ca. Here is the opening essay of that website, posted on the homepage. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will write the first installment of the second chapter.

Between 1908 and 1913, Henry Ford perfected the manufacturing of his Model T, revolutionizing the way ‘things’ were made and sold and ushering in the age of mass production.Between 1908-1913, D. W. Griffith produced hundreds of his Biograph silent film shorts, effectively giving birth to the American Film Industry.Between 1908-1913, Coco Chanel launched her fashion house in Paris, just as the fight for women’s suffrage reached its apex. She eventually redefined women’s clothing, liberating female limbs and lungs with soft fabrics and shorter hemlines, but too late to soften the image of the militant suffragettes.And between 1908-1913, bark salesman turned railroader Norman Nicholson of Richmond, Quebec, his feisty wife Margaret, their spirited daughters, Edith, Marion and Flora and lost soul of a son, Herb, were a proud family in crisis, teetering on the brink of financial ruin.The family left behind a vivid written record of their day-to-day trials, thoughts and feelings, in letter-form. Fittingly, talk of fashion, entertainment and long dusty trips in automobiles pervades these letters.For those of you who thought feminism was invented in the 1960′s, these letters will be a real eye-opener. For those of you who love Canadian history and marvel at the way technology changes us, these letters, penned at such a pivotal time in history, will be something of a revelation.