Recommendations

My friend Annie has done a great job lately on filling us in on her reading and film viewing habits. I've recently been kept company by a few works that I thought I should share:

You know how some music makes you feel like you're driving in a car with the windows open, through the mountains, as the sun is going down, and you're caked with dirt, sweat and bug bites from camping, and the car is full of your friends, and you're really, really happy, convinced that, no matter what happens in your life, things are going to turn out alright? (Or is that just me?)

I heard Josh Ritter's song "Good Man" played over the end of the finale of "House M.D.," season three. It conveyed the kind of lightness and wholeness that sent me running to my computer to figure out what song it was, and the inevitable subsequent iTunes purchase. Worth every penny - especially the song "Snow is Gone," from his album Hello Starling, with the memorable line: "I'd rather be the one who loves/ than to be loved and never even know." How've I gone this long without hearing this guy?! He's a Westerner (from Idaho) and his songs are full of wildlife and landscapes and all the stuff that makes me achingly homesick for summer and roads that I know.


There's a term for people who are highly knowledgeable in many areas - they're called polymaths. I make no pretensions to being one; I do, however, find myself endlessly fascinated by a new podcast, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, that I signed up for a couple months ago. One week, it's the history of The Arabian Nights and its acceptance into European literary circles, the next week,"The Discovery of Oxygen," then insights on the Fibonacci sequence, followed by explication of Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, "The Prelude". Not to mention investigations into the notion of guilt, what constitutes taste, Arab medieval philosophy.... It is a yummy program. The host interviews professors who are experts on the various topics and it's phenomenally engaging, even if you never thought "the discovery of oxygen" could make for a good 45 minute interview. I find myself wishing more of my university classes had been like these.


Ever since the days of reading Little House on the Prairie under my covers as a 7 year old (thus ruining my eyesight forever), I have been a notorious sucker for stories of pioneer wives. A friend sent me a DVD of an independent film, Sweet Land, that was released to a handful of theaters last year. I confess that before watching it I was skeptical of it being of the Janette Oke, western-wife-finds-God- and-love-on-the-prairie sort, full of heavy-handed Hallmark Hall of Fame greeting card sentimentality. I was very sweetly pleased to find otherwise (that is, after I got through wiping up the puddles of tears I cried seeing the big family scene at the film's opening. Yikes, I'm homesick! Don't worry, the film's only a tear-jerker for the currently exiled expats to whom America looms mythically large and beautiful from a distance).

Without giving away the (simple) plot too much, it's basically about a mail-order bride who comes to Minnesota from Norway in 1920. There are the expected challenges and prejudices, but what makes the movie surprising is the subtleness, silence and open spaces in the film. I LOVED the fact that there are large portions of Norwegian and German dialog left completely untranslated by subtitles - from two Norwegian young women chatting together at the train station, to the outbursts the frustrated young women shouts at her groom-to-be. They communicate with each other in smatterings of broken English, Norwegian, and German cognates, but other than that, there is a lot of silence, confusion and muddling through. I like this linguistic element for two reasons, 1. it reminds me that America has had, and always will have, the kind of linguistic diversity that I live with every day in Lithuania (even if no longer in the places I happen to live in the States), and 2. I can SO relate to the young woman's disorientation as so much of what goes on around her is unintelligible, even as she tries to figure out where she fits in this society.

Finally, it made me think about the lovely young women who I've met over the years at LCC, Ana from Albania, Agata from Lativa, and my friend Oksana a Russian-Lithuanian (among others) who have married American men, and whose own national stories are now going to be knit into those of my home country, just as mine has (just a little bit) been knit into this one. I love how strong these women are, to do the hard task of making homes in the world, to leave everything known behind and plant your feet firmly where you've arrived. The immigration debates going on in the States today are not new ones, but this film and my friends who're currently living out this story remind me of the rich history of America, and how its story is, fundamentally, the collective story of millions of individuals who have lived out this one.