JUST TAKE ME BACK TO BRAMASOLE

“I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.” ― Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

Usually, I try to read the book before I see the movie. "The Godfather," "Heartburn," "Rosemary's Baby" were all great books which added to my enjoyment of the movies. I must have seen  "Under the Tuscan Sun" at least fifteen times on TV, not to mention all the times I popped in the DVD. At some point during all those viewings, I  was honestly surprised to learn that the movie was loosely based on Frances Mayes' memoir, that Bramasole really exists!

I've always been a slow reader, so I set myself a goal for 2012: I was going to read, on average, a book each week.  Murder mysteries and thrillers are my favorites. But like Frances, I thought it was time that I "move beyond what I knew." So I read the first couple of sentences on Amazon:

I am about to buy a house in a foreign country. A house with the beautiful name of Bramasole.

And that's when I bought the book.

The book's 280 pages are deceptively long, partly due to the font size, which seemed smaller than I'm used to. Watching the movie first actually improved my interest in the book. Since the book is literary, I doubt I would have bought it without having seen the movie first. 


The book is about Bramasole and Tuscany, about restoring the villa, about cooking -- she's included quite a few recipes -- and it's about gardening. After reading about wasps in her book I may never eat another Fig Newton:

"[T]he fig flower is inside the fruit.  To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.  Fig pollination takes place through an interaction with a particular kind of wasp about one eighth of an inch long.  The female bores into the developing flower inside the fig. Once in, she delves with her oviposter, a curved needle nose, into the female flower's ovary, depositing her own eggs.  If her oviposter can't reach the ovary (some of the flowers have long styles), she still fertilizes the fig flower with the pollen she collected from her travels.  Either way, one half of this symbiotic system is served--the wasp larvae develop if she has left her eggs or the pollinated fig flower produces seed.  If reincarnation is true, let me not come back as a fig wasp.  If the female can't find a suitable nest for her eggs, she usually dies of exhaustion inside the fig.  If she can, the wasps hatch inside the fig and all the males are born without wings.  Their sole, brief function is sex.  They get up and fertilize the females, then help them tunnel out of the fruit.  Then they die.  The females fly out, carrying enough sperm from the tryst to fertilize all their eggs.  Is this appetizing, to know that however luscious figs taste, each one is actually a little graveyard of wingless male wasps?  Or maybe the sensuality of the fruit comes from some flavor they dissolve into after short, sweet lives."

There are differences between the book and the movie. The biggest difference deals with Ed, an American. Ed is not the Italian Marcello in the movie. Ed and Frances both teach in universities in San Francisco. They are together in the beginning; there was no chance meeting of Ed in the book, like the impetuous fling when movie Francis met Marcello. I never learn from the book if they were married or not. I'm not even sure if Frances alone bought Bramasole or if she and Ed bought it together. In fact, there are few personal details about Frances in her memoir.  


I learned more about Frances in this interview . Like how her readers clamor to hear about Ed. (Were they expecting Marcello?) "Under the Tuscan Sun" may lack personal anecdotes, however Frances did open up in the interview and related this hilarious story:

She and Ed get married, and when her own daughter marries, she's embarrassed to relate, she has changed so much that she doesn't even recognize her ex-husband at the wedding. "I'm Frances, Ashley's mother,'' she says to him. Assuming she's joking, he replies that he is Ashley's father

I loved reading about the villa's restoration, but when Frances decided to take us on a 50-page tour of Tuscany, I almost shelved the book right then and there. Good, Lord, Frances, just take me back to Bramasole! I had googled Bramasole and discovered you can rent it. I wanted to find out how that happened -- Did she sell Bramasole? Did she turn it into a B&B or a hotel? -- so I skipped 'the tour' completely, jumping over those 50 pages, and finished the book. Frances never mentioned anything about renting it out. Instead, I did learn some of what has happened to Bramasole, since the book was published, at a site called Hooked on Houses: "Under the Tuscan Sun": The Real-Life Renovated Villa. I'm fairly certain Frances and Ed Mayes still own Bramasole, and I suspect they rent it out when they're staying at their other home in San Francisco. Apparently, lots of villa owners everywhere do that.

I gave the book 4 stars on Goodreads. I would have given it 5 stars had it not been for the Tuscany tour. 

P.S. Oh, and by the way, I've read 30 books in 29 weeks :~)

...

"THE FIRST DAY I DID NOT THINK IT WAS FUNNY"

The first day I did not think it was funny. I didn't think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it. "The most unfair thing about this whole business," I said, "is that I can't even date." Well, you had to be there, as they say, because when I put it down on paper it doesn't sound funny. But what made it funny (trust me) is the word 'date,' which when you say it out loud at the end of a sentence has a wonderful teenage quality, and since I am not a teenager (okay, I'm thirty-eight), and since the reason I was hardly in a position to date on first learning that my second husband had taken a lover was that I was seven months pregnant, I got a laugh on it... 

So begins Nora Ephron's book Heartburn. I read the book before I saw the movie. In fact, when I saw the previews for the 1986 movie, I decided to read the book first. After all these years, and after reading hundreds of books, that beginning remains the best beginning I have ever read. 

"Heartburn" was based on her marriage to Carl Bernstein, whom she described in the book as a man  "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind."  (I've often wondered if that boosted Carl's love life?) Nora is Rachel Samstat in the book (played by Meryl Streep in the movie) and Carl is Mark Forman (Jack Nicholson).

When Rachel confided in her friend, Julie, that Mark was cheating on her, Julie tells Rachael how she coped with her own husband's infidelity: "Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral . . . and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral..." I wonder if that's a true quote from one of Nora's friends or another great bit of writing? 

The Net is loaded with Nora Ephron articles about her life. She was a staunch Leftie whose anti-Right jabs have generated lots of bitter comments from conservatives. I'm a conservative, and while I hate her politics, I still love her writing. She was a talented writer who has been one of my inspirations. I prefer to avoid and/or overlook her political barbs -- there aren't that many in what I've read -- and enjoy her stories. Nora Ephron was that good a writer.

My sympathies to her family, especially Nicholas Pileggi, with whom she found true happiness. I doubt he's thinking of flirting at the funeral.

...

Take Two...

In this interview, Nora Ephron talks about how her parents didn't want to hear her "sad story." They told her, "Everything is copy. Everything is material,"  which she incorporated later into "Heartburn":

Arthur Siegal (Richard Masur): What can I say? I've always been terrible with colors. It comes from having grown up with the single-row box of crayons, instead of the big box. If I had had the big box, I would now know taupe and cerise and ecru. Instead, all I know is burnt sienna.
 Mark Forman (Jack Nicholson): I think there's a column in this.
 Arthur: Oh, God, Forman, every time I say something, it ends up in your column.

...


Take Three...

John Podhortz remembers Nora with Nora Ephron: A great NY dame: Nora Ephron, who died last night at the age of 71, may have been the quintessential Manhattanite of her time. The island was her muse, and she its great romanticizer.

...

TOO MANY ROOMS

There's a scene in Dr. Zhivago in which Yuri Zhivago returns  from the war to his home in Moscow. During his absence it had been confiscated. Whole families now lived in single rooms. As a result, the once-magnificent mansion had obviously deteriorated. Yuri was met by the angry residents and informed that the house was now home to thirteen families. 

I was reminded of that when I read UK elderly are “wasting too many bedrooms”:  London, England - In yet another outrageous piece of social engineering from our coalition government, pensioners will be encouraged to downsize to smaller properties allowing local councils to rent their homes out as council houses and manage the tenancy.

How long before we're told we have too many rooms?

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"YOU HAVE AN IDEA, YOU WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU WANNA SAY"

Bill Peschel's posts are always fascinating, loaded with trivia about famous people. He wrote a book called Writers Gone Wild (I bought 2 copies and gave one to a friend):

"If you’ve imagined famous writers to be desk-bound drudge, think again. Writers Gone Wild rips back the (book) covers and reveals the seamy underside of the writing life." 

I found that picture of Marilyn Monroe, by Eve Arnold, via a link in Peschel's sidebar. Click on the picture and you'll notice the book is "Ulysses," by James Joyce. Somehow I doubt Marilyn actually read the book. I lived in a college town when I was in high school, and I was always trying to impress the college boys with my brains. So, I would prominently carry some snobbish literary doorstop in public, something I'd never read, of course. Eventually, it occurred to me that college boys were not interested in girls' brains. I wonder how many men noticed the title of the book Marilyn's holding? I looked, but then I'm a woman.

But I digress...

In Peschel's latest post, he ponders Why successful writers are doing more than you (and me) :

"If you’re thinking about why you’re not a success, it’s because you’re thinking about why you’re not a success. 

In other words, self-reflective people, people who think about things, start farther behind the success curve as people who don’t think about such things."

I've never wondered why I'm not a 'successful' writer; I know why. I've written a few things, and I've actually sold two pieces. I was paid $125 for a guest op-ed in USA Today back in 1992, and I sold  a short story for $5. In fact I write so little that I can hardly refer to myself as a 'writer.' But I love it when an idea clicks, because even though the writing can be stressful at times, there's nothing like a creative high. So, I began blogging again just to kick-start my brain and get those dusty synapses firing again.

But Peschel does have a point.

There's a great scene in the movie "Get Shorty" in which Chili Palmer (John Travolta) and Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo) discuss writing a movie script.

CHILI: You know how to write one of these? 

BO CATLETT: There's nothin' to know. You have an idea, you write down what you wanna say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren't positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words . . . although I've seen scripts where I know words weren't spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it at all. So I don't think it's too important. Anyway, you come to the last page you write in 'Fade out' and that's the end, you're done. 

CHILI: That's all there is to it, huh? 

BO CATLETT: That's all.

Nothing "self-reflective" about Bo. Just write down what you wanna say. That's it. Y'gotta love the simplicity. I'm sure there are writers who can do exactly that: just write. I'm not that kind of writer. I think too much about details before I ever type one letter -- punctuation, back story, names, even script format sometimes -- and it trips me up every time. I don't know how to "just write." And lately the ideas have dried up. I'm hoping blogging will prime the pump.

Btw, I know the conventional wisdom is that Travolta re-energized his career with "Pulp Fiction," but I say it was doing Get Shorty. It's one of the funniest movies ever. And who can ever forget Dennis Farina: "I'm Ray Barboni from Miami"  “They say the fucking smog is the fucking reason you have such beautiful fucking sunsets.”

My writing...

> Briefs and Other Unmentionables

> Kitty Myers: In a thousand words, more or less.

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