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Similarly to Defoe's "Moll Flanders," Cleland's novel begins with its heroine, Fanny Hill, an innocent, uneducated country girl, thrown at a very early age into the cruel world of London and forced into a life of prostitution. As an innocent virgin, the madam whose house she live in is saving Fanny for a noble customer whom they expect daily, but learns about sexual commerce by watching other prostitutes in the house. Eloping with a beautiful, wealthy young man named Charles before she engages in any sexual activity, the novel concerns Fanny's sexual awakenings and her life with and without her first love, Charles. The way that the novel refigures fidelity in the relationship between Fanny and Charles is astounding.
Cleland's master-stroke, if you will, linguistically, is to write a whole-heartedly pornographic novel and couch everything in such a rich variety of metaphors. Graphic scenarios can be found on almost every page, but there is a marked and remarkable absence of graphic language. Structurally, Cleland's plotting of Fanny Hill's escapades is exquisitely balanced and even-handed. Morally and aesthetically, "Memoirs" comes straight out of the strain of 18th century moral philosophy associated by turns, with Shaftesbury and David Hume. From Shaftesbury, Cleland takes the idea that aesthetics and morality should be judged on an equal form in works of art. From Hume, he takes the radical stance that vices and luxuries are not inherently evil, and even acceptable when not carried to extremes. Cleland makes judicious use of these structural and philosophical elements in creating one of the strongest and most liberated heroines in English literature.
Among other points of interest in the novel, there is the prevalence and even propriety of expressions of feminine desire, agency, power, and control over self and circumstances. Aside from her first entrance into London and her various periods as a kept-mistress, Fanny Hill is educated by the prostitute Phoebe, and the procuress Mrs. Cole to be an independent, self-regulating subject. Related to this is the rather revolutionary notion inferred that sexual education predicates all other sources of knowledge, and is at heart, the basis and foundation of human interaction, at least in the semi-utopic world of the novel.
There are so many fascinating things about Cleland's "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," it would take forever to puzzle through them all. All the same, I've only been able myself to think critically about the novel at some distance of remove from reading it. Reading this novel was an interesting, but frustrating, and at times impossible task. It's not a difficult novel to read in terms of prose, but for a 188 page novel, it tends to overwhelm everything else while you're reading it. Like I said, reading "Memoirs" is an experience - I often had to look at the cover to recall that this is no simple work of pornography, but an acknowledged work of classic literature. By all accounts, a captivating novel. It gets five stars just because it is so amazing and outlandish. Aside from the Marquis de Sade, who belongs properly to the excesses of the Romantic Era, I had no idea that there was anything even remotely like this in the 18th century. To quote that immortal philospher, Stephon Marbury, Cleland's novel is "all nude...but tastefully done."
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What you can't see from home is that the book is truly tiny, about a quarter inch thick and six inches square. It's only 144 pages long; the last 35 of those pages are a John Ford filmography and the first 35 are a Bogdanovitch essay.
The interviews in between are similarly miniature, and in typical Bogdanovitch fashion they revolve more around anecdotes and personalities than film making and theory. For instance, here's what Ford says about my nominee for his best film, My Darling Clementine:
"I knew Wyatt Earp. In the very early silent days, a couple of times a year, he would come up to visit pals, cowboys he knew in Tombstone; alot of them were in my company. I think I was an assistant prop boy then and I used to give him a chair and a cup of coffee, and he told me about the fight at the O. K. Corral. So in My Darling Clementine, we did it exactly as it had been. They didn't just walk up in the street and start banging away at each other; it was a clever military maneuver."
And that's it. A good story. But a short one. Not much about the film itself, though, is there? The longest statements go on for about one full page.
Ford's thoughts on film making are scattered throughout, and it's good stuff:
-On his dislike of close-ups: "We've got this big screen - instead of putting a lot of pockmarked faces on it...play a scene in a two-shot. You see people instead of faces."
-On actors: "If you get the first or second take, there's a sparkle, an uncertainty about it; they're not sure of their lines, and it gives you a sense of nervousness and suspense."
-On film music: "I don't like to see a man alone in the desert, dying of thirst, with the Philadelphia Orchestra behind him."
Ford talks about almost every film he ever made, including most of the silents that no one's ever seen. You can read the book in one sitting, and by the end you'll have a sense of who John Ford was and what he was all about. Since Ford hated giving interviews, but was very patient with Bogdanovitch, this one is something of a standout.
It's a good book, I just wish there was more of it.
(A poster below slags the Hitchcock/ Truffaut book; don't listen to him, that book is marvelous.)
John Ford was quite an elusive character. He was considered a great artist inside and outside of Hollywood during his life. This short book isn't a bad attempt to have him comment on those films most precious to him and to us. Unlike Orson Welles, who made only a few films over 40 years, and spoke on them extensively with Bogdanovich, Ford speaks just a sentence or two or maybe a paragraph on some of the greatest films of all time. Grapes of Wrath? "I liked the idea of a family going out and trying to find their way in the world." She Wore a Yellow Ribbon? "I tried to copy the Remington style there." The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? "I think they were both good characters and I rather liked the story."
I hope I haven't made it sound too simplistic, because Ford actually reveals the most important parts of his films with very few words. Just reading a sentence or two and watching the film gives you the idea of what Ford was trying to convey. It may even give these films new meaning.
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The chapters on various island groups are described by different authors, with uneven quality. We have been to areas covered in three chapters, The Discovery Islands, The Clayoquot Sound, and the Gulf Islands. The details of the two of the chapters were precise, the hazards were as described (as we discovered when we did not take them seriously enough - I was almost run over by a whale watching boat in the fog off Vargus Island, a hazard that we had not taken seriously even though it was clearly described in the chapter).
The chapter on the Discovery Islands in some cases offered vague or incorrect details as to the location of camp sites.
For some reason, we did not find this book on the Amazon web site by using searches that should have found it, for example kayaking British Columbia. But our local Kayak store carried it.
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