Gone With the Wind Turns 75

Although disputable, the date June 30 marks the anniversary of the publication of what many consider “the great American novel, one that Time magazine placed on its ALL TIME 100 novels list, and a book James Michener said “It’s the shortest long novel I have ever read,” Gone With the Wind. 

I loved this book when I first read it the summer before my junior year in high school, and then again about 10 years ago. This occasion serves as reason enough to read Gone With the Wind for the third time, with enhanced appreciation for the book, the movie and the captivating story of both.

An interview with the Ellen F. Brown, author of this book may be watched on this CBS video. But skip this if it you don't want to watch the commercial

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood––a book about the book––appeared this spring, its release timed to coincide with the 75^th anniversary of the classic literary novel. While this book does summarize the process of Margaret Mitchell writing the novel (10 years to complete), this book focuses more on the book’s publishing saga as well as the making of the movie, and the lengths Margaret Mitchell had to go to protect her literary rights.

The Life Is in the Book

Both publication and the making of the 1939 movie, which won numerous Academy Awards including Best Picture, occurred in record time. 

 “In less than a year," Ellen Brown writes, "Mitchell had gone from unemployed reporter and housewife to proud parent of an imminent bestseller. Her reference that spring [1939] to the book as her first and only child was an apt one. Since the contract’s signing, she had spent approximately forty weeks bringing the manuscript to full term. Like any first-time mother, the thirty-five-year-old author was nervous. And, as with parenthood, no matter how stressful the pregnancy, the biggest adjustments were yet to come.”

What a great analogy because books, like children, take on a life of their own. 

Check out this link to an early review of Gone With the Wind, published on July 6, 1936. Nobody, including the author, the Macmillan publishers or readers could have known how far the wind would carry this great story.

Read it and weep.

Please read it and don't settle for watching the 4-hour movie, even though the David O. Selznick production stands on its own merits.

Boys in a Tent

Should have known I was in for a treat when grandsons Beau and Beck arrived. Their mom said, "They dressed themselves."

Shirts and ties and sweats. Flip-flops and clogs. Their individuality shows. Their smiles make me glad.






At last, the search for the lost tent ends. And I knew when I grabbed my camera, a blog post would follow.

Space, the final frontier.

Spontaneous pose captured by a quick click.

"Cheese"

Vantage points. I wonder how I looked to them?

Beau on the left, Beck on the right

Scout from behind

What next?

How do we get in?

This is a little tricky.

"We're in here."

Can you see? "I'm sideways."

"We didn't get enough sleep in the real night."

"We didn't get enough sleep in the real night." I love the way these boys put words together to express their thoughts. I don't think their parents ever get enough sleep in the real night.

"We're in our own igloo … This is for outside when it is snowing."

"If there was a storm, there would be no sun."

Plenty of sun around here though. Lubbock, America made the national news last night as an emblem of the drought in Texas. Reporting only .88 inches of rain so far this year, unprecedented since 1927, even Houston has received half of its normal rainfall to date.

Meanwhile, Memphis is drowning as the mighty Mississippi River flexes it muscles, flooding beyond its banks threatening cities all the way to New Orleans.

Thankfully, these boys in a tent remain free from adult anxieties. They don't watch the news.

Still for about 5 seconds

The Royal Wedding in Pictures

"She wore the dress. The dress didn't wear her."

The Royal Wedding: Official Programme

The Official Royal Wedding Website

In the midst of our own family BIG-0 birthday celebrations for my husband and youngest daughter, The Royal Wedding took a recorded rather than live action priority. Wedding streamed from the Royal Channel on YouTube, this link lets you select portions of the coverage to replay.

Yes, I watched as much coverage as I could while baking and otherwise preparing for a house full of guests, my own version of bed, bath and body and beyond. I have no servants.

Still, I wanted to blog. I wanted to quote speeches and search for pictures that displayed the day's events from start to finish. Having visited London and walked through Westminster Abbey where so much English history is memorialized, I had plenty of scope for the imagination.

Here's a summary then of what commentators called "the wedding of the century," which of course means this century. Do the math. Nothing for the next 88 years can top this occasion. Apparently billions of people agree.

These are the best pictures I found, "The Big Picture" at boston.com

Other coverage noted as follows:

The Telegraph Coverage of the Wedding

ABC News photos of the Royal Wedding

The Reception Dress and other links via AOL

Wedding of the century indeed or perhaps, but such a statement made me think of a recent American Idol live broadcast when Jennifer Lopez referred to James Durbin's performance as the best of the night, and he was only the second person to perform. Or while awaiting the Royal Couple's much anticipated balcony kiss, one talking head predicted a "Hollywood style kiss full of passion" between William and Catherine. Ooops.

Chuckle and nod to hindsight when we climb out on a limb and carry our own saw.

Here's a link to Time magazine's Mad Hatters, also called "13 Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hats." I love hats.

Favorite quote: “When Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, married Philip Mountbatten in November 1947, Winston Churchill welcomed the wedding as 'a flash of color on the hard road we travel.'”

Crowds gathered and behaved

Apparently billions of people agree that Prince William and Catherine's Royal Wedding brightens the current world scene, a flash of color set against the gloomy backdrop of killer tornadoes on this side of The Pond, earthquakes in various places as well as ongoing wars against terrorists.

Although unlikely that I will return to this topic, I do want to go on record: the wedding was SPLENDID.

We the people love our fairy tales.

And I hope that the prince and his bride live happily ever after.

Funding for the Arts

"Migrant Mother," Dorothea Lange, 1936)

Imagine a world without color. Life without Art. 

The best slogan I ever read about Art:

ART

You can't spell SMART without it

Follow this link to MSNBC where Chris Matthews interviews Kevin Spacey about budget cuts to the Arts. Sent to me from the Media department at Dallas Theological Seminary, keeping me posted because I received a degree in Media and Communication from DTS, please take time to consider this topic.

My daughter teaches choir in high school in an area deprived of advantages, yet the school district still offers arts education classes in music, band and art. 

Arts provide a lifeline to people trapped in poverty, if nothing else, by helping individuals envision a way out.

Ordinarily, I avoid issue-driven policy. As the political climate grows increasingly heated over budget debates, choosing ideological battles becomes increasingly important. Is this another Civil War?

A lot of what gets funded in the Arts stinks, but the culture needs the Arts more than it realizes, for one thing, to maintain our sense of shared history and encourage civil dialogue. This article in Psychology Today discusses a number of other benefits.

Thank you, Maya Angelou

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

picture from Maya Angelou website

This quote by Maya Angelou appeared in The Writer's Almanac, April 4, 2011. The brief article commemorates her birthday, which also notes April 4 as the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, on what was then Maya Angelou's 40th birthday.

Once a friend took me to hear Dr. Maya Angelou speak at event held in a university arena, a large venue so that thousands could see her in person. Maya Angelou seemed small against a backdrop where competing teams in sporting events devour that space, a poet's tiny voice crying in the wilderness.

Unimpressed by the speaker, for me the best part about being there was being there with my friend. 

Now, years later, a connection between Maya Angelou and me sparked when I read that quote, as if an arc of current suddenly breached the philosophical and physical, as well as theological space that separates us.

I bear an untold story. It helps to know that someone understands that agony, the weight of bearing. 

Every day I confront my writer self with the question of whether I will ever tell that story. If I write that story, will someone publish it? If published, who would read it? Does anyone care either way?

In a way, I wish I had someone else's story to tell. I continue a love affair with reading other people's stories. Captivated, I fully appreciate the writer's ability to tell their story well. Reading The Pioneer Woman's Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, I wish I had a frolicking love story to tell. 

Reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, the writers chronicle the literary journey from book to film. The story shows through Margaret Mitchell's experience how a book takes on a life of its own, quite apart from the author's best intentions or hopes or aspirations.

That's what scares me. What happens when a writer releases his or her words to readers? Best line from Back to the Future, "I don't think I could take that kind of rejection."

However, I want to write the book I was born to write, to somehow tell a coherent story that makes sense of my life. Rather than report facts or record incidents, I need to craft the story. But I have been trained to write reports. About writing, I still have a lot to unlearn. 

The reporter me has a just the facts detachment, a kind of third eye, which keeps me a safe distance from the emotional pain of a childhood fraught with uncertainty about everything. You never know what's behind Door Number Three. Surviving a tumultuous, extended period of confusion, all I ever wanted was to feel safe. 

Writing about your life is not safe. 

What has occurred to me though, looking in the rearview mirror, all the really dramatic stuff happened at the beginning, as I held on for dear life to my mother's flapping coattails.

Near the end of her life, knowing she would die with cancer, my mother wrote a brief summary of her life. "My checkered life," she called it, and while not her obvious meaning, if I envision a chess board, I can see that my mother never did anything in an ordered way.

Yet in living my life, I have tried to overcompensate for her disorder. A curious tension between us continues long since her departure. 

Thus, I bear the burden of an untold story inside me. My story involves the most interesting person I ever knew. I seek to honor the life that my mother lived because with all her wild and random choices, she managed to shape mine.

Today, I have Maya Angelou to thank for inspiring me to keep writing.

Hyacinth, here and gone: Is it Spring yet?

Record breaking heat yesterday and today in Lubbock, America, 92 degrees. The spring bulbs came and went with much ado about hardly anything. Oh, but these flowers were lovely while they lasted. And the cut ones, the ones the dogs mowed down, I brought into the house to enjoy their fragrance.  

What I learned about planting these bulbs: plant closer together and in clumps.The purple blooms first, much sooner than the yellow, so plant colors together for greater impact. Watch these bloom in waves.

And to think these bulbs were buried before Christmas. 

A thirty degree drop between the high temperature today and high expected tomorrow, the wind is blowing and the sky is brown. Lows can still dip below freezing until Mother's Day. 

Spring keeps teasing me.

Pretty, but purple wins the day

Elizabeth Taylor: Death of a Perennial Presence

 

Katie Couric opened the CBS Evening News: "Tonight America says goodbye to one of its biggest stars, Academy Award-winning actress, Elizabeth Taylor … If movie stars are America's royalty, then Elizabeth Taylor was queen and her long reign has come to an end."

Treated as the top news story of today, Couric spent more than 8-minutes at the beginning of the broadcast describing the 79-year-old actress––her life, her loves and her career––and another 3-minutes at the end recounting Liz Taylor's work as a spokesperson for AIDS.

The time devoted to this story on national news attests to the power of film, which transcends its medium. Millions of people feel as if someone they knew personally has died. Her UK obituary recounts the milestones of an extraordinary life lived both on and off camera. The NYT posted a summary of her life, stating that "In a world of flickering images, Elizabeth Taylor was a constant star."

I often wondered if she got tired of shining.

Giant, 1956

My favorite Elizabeth Taylor movie Giant captures on film the peak of her physical beauty against the backdrop of Texas cattle, oil and excess.

All three of the movie's stars loomed larger than life in celestial Hollywood, but James Dean died in a car accident before the film's completion. Rock Hudson died in 1985 from AIDS.

"All gone" my mother once wrote in an album under a picture of my dad, my grandfather, an uncle and their friend. My dad died in a car accident when I was 9 years old, and I used to stare at that picture, run my fingers across those words.

Pictures somehow accentuate the loss. The loss of youth, the loss of beauty, the loss of life.

Father of the Bride, 1950

After watching more than a dozen videos on YouTube, this one called "Elizabeth Taylor: A Thing of Beauty" (4 minutes) has wonderful film clips from some of her best movies.

My favorites: Giant (1956), Raintree County (1957), Elephant Walk (1954), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Father of the Bride (1950), National Velvet (1944), and Little Women (1949).

The artist and the artifact, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.