Any Resemblance to the Original Novel is Purely Coincidental

So I just sat through all three hours of The English Patient.

Before we begin the rant, three minor notes:

1. I didn't know Colin Firth was going to be in this movie. I also didn't know he was going to look so puffy and bloated. Was it a character choice, or was he having a really bad year?

2. No one -- may I emphasize no one -- sits down at a piano after who-knows-how-many months of not practicing and rips off the Goldberg Variations. Especially on a piano that's turned f**king SIDEWAYS.

3. I would like to purchase Kristin Scott Thomas' entire film wardrobe. If you have information on how I can do so, please email me at prettybluesalwar AT hotmail DOT com.

Now the rant.

Yes, I knew going in that it wasn't going to be "like the book." What I didn't know was that Ondaatje had helped to create the film, and has gone on record as stating it is a good adaptation which "preserves his artistic vision." (Hey Wikipedia, where'd you get that source, btw? I'd like to see it.)

Unfortunately, it does not preserve either his plot or characters.

This begs the question: what is the artistic vision Ondaatje had when writing the book? Was it a sort of feeling, maybe? Did he get a sense of a plane swooping over a desert with silk flapping out the side, perhaps to the strains of a melody which sounds suspiciously like the waltz from Carousel?

If the essence of the book can be boiled down to, say, Almasy and Katherine in the cave -- if that's a sort of "artistic impression" an author might want his readers to remember -- well, the film nailed that. I curled up on the couch and cried for poor Almasy and Katherine, and I'd spent the past two-and-one-half hours not caring about either of them.

But a book is more than a vision, yes? A book has... well, a book is like somebody's life as it actually was. And films seem to have a responsibility to present that particular life.

There are, of course, writer/screenwriters like Michael Cunningham, who explained away the differences between the book and film versions of The Hours by saying "the film version is like my final final draft, with all the edits I would have made in the book had I known to make them all those years ago when I first wrote it." (Can't link this one for you; it's on the DVD special features.)

But...

but...

Okay. Here's the question. Why do we make movies based on books? It would seem that we make them because enough people love the book that we know they'll pay to see a "fully realized" version. They want to see the story brought to life.

Then why do we change the story? I understand truncating for time, but why, for example, dispense with Caravaggio having known Hana since she was a child? How does making him a stranger to Hana add anything to the story?

Maybe, however, there is an ulterior motive. Perhaps Ondaatje knew that, at this particular moment, all the people who had read the book would tap sensually at the shoulders of all their dates (who hadn't read the book) and whisper sexily "in the real story, he was her sort-of uncle!" This would not only increase bonding among dates, possibly leading to nookie, but it would also increase sales of Ondaatje's book, as undoubtedly the non-readers would immediately go out and purchase this text to inculcate themselves with the reading half of the date, because they're hoping this will lead, in turn, to even more nookie.

Love-me-love-my-book.

But seriously now. Why do we so fantastically alter stories when we transition from text to film? Do we not trust the audience to understand a "book story?" Do we want to add extra drama/fights/gore/sex/sandstorms?

This is a question I have never been able to satisfactorily answer, and it just makes me sad, because I know that whenever they make a movie based on a book I've particularly liked, I will go shell out my hard-earned $10 to see it, despite the fact that I know perfectly well it will probably be a poor interpretation which will leave me disappointed and/or angry.

Does it make you all as angry as it makes me?

But perhaps the best revenge we can take upon this film "adaptation" of The English Patient is simply this: the knowledge that no one will ever be able to watch that film again and truly believe in Ralph Fiennes' character. They'll sit there, just as I did, and spend the three hours thinking Voldemort, Voldemort, he looks like Voldemort, wonder if Warner Bros. stole the idea, ha ha, now Voldemort's sad...

^__^

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Calories

Today, when I was loading my dinner up onto my pretty, pretty Fiestaware and admiring the way the orange-browns of the potato-and-coconut-stew coordinated against the blue plate (yes, I have multicolored Fiestaware and yes, I choose my dishes based on which will best bring out the color of the food), I suddenly realized I had a digital camera and that the batteries were, for once, reasonably charged.

From now on, when I blog about a cooking experiment, I'll include a picture. And then you all can rate it: yeah, it looks pretty good or um... what's that supposed to be again?

Tonight's dinner was a potato-and-coconut stew, from Chandra Padmanabhan's Southern Spice, featured alongside yogurt, mango pickle, and some really bad naan.

What do you think? Aside from the grease spot on the naan (should have airbrushed that one out), does it look palatable?

It certainly tasted good, although I'm guessing I put in too much haldi because when I was done eating it, my right-hand fingers were stained yellow.

But only up through the first digit. ^__^

On Page Two Hundred Eighty-Six

Near the end of the book
(without giving anything away)
she stumbles in front of this sentence:

They would never have dropped such a bomb
(you know, the bomb)
on a white nation.

Suddenly her history
(textbooks, lectures, tales of necessity)
falls into shatters against the text.

Caravaggio, Hana, Kip, and the patient
(who requested his name not be used)
stop what they are doing and stare at her ignorance.

A breeze ruffles the pages.

Through the Membrane: In Praise of Ondaatje

I'm really getting a kick out of this temping gig.

Having just finished Italo Calvino's If On A Winter Night A Traveler (which is the book I marginalized for S., and which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who likes a good postmodern, wickedly recursive narrative), I am now two-thirds through The English Patient.

S. bought me this book during the NYC trip, as an introduction to Ondaatje, whom I had never read. We saw it first sitting on the sidewalk as part of a street book sale, but he didn't buy that copy; he wanted my first taste of Ondaatje to be hardbound, solid, permanent. So we wandered through a few used bookstores until we found one that was worthy of reading.

Anyway. The novel surprised me. Not by its clarity or detail or poetry -- I was expecting all of that -- but by the way it drew me into the story.

Some books, like the Calvino, one has to read with a half-detached mind, one side reading while the other working busily to put together the puzzles the author has set forward. Some books, like The Sari Shop, are entertaining but constantly invite the awareness that one is reading "a story." Some books, like our friend Suitable Boy (and Equal Music, for that matter -- I would guess Golden Gate as well though I've not yet read it) require parsing, rereading, pondering, savoring.

And some books seem to push you through a membrane where you find yourself not reading, really; not being aware of putting one word in front of the other but instead experiencing the book as a series of images coming at you as fast as life. Sometimes reading is an experience akin to dreaming.

And The English Patient is like that, which surprised me, because I hadn't "fallen into" a book quite like that for a few years. It reminds me of how I used to read as a child, which perhaps is because this temp experience (and the experience of finishing a task quickly so that one can return, breathlessly, to a group of characters held underneath one's desk) is so reminiscent of being in elementary school.

To my readers: which books have pushed you "through the membrane?" Which made you forget that there was any other world besides the one in the pages?

A Poem On Food

How can I eat the sesame laddus
Without you? The memory of your
Cracking through their hardness,
Taking them between your teeth and then
Passing them to me as a bird does,
Bit by bit, from your hand to my lips
Diminishes all possibility of my
Breaking my own without your assistance,
Turning the sweetness into a gnashing of teeth.

The khatta meetha is addictive, in its
Little zippered bag, red and cheerful,
With lettering in three languages, wrapping
My tongue around the syllables as it wraps
Around each individual peppered pulse.
The eggplant sits serenely, waiting for its turn
Among the oil and rice and garam masala.

But the gift that continues me back
And back again
Is the chocolate, nicer than any I've ever had --
The one flavor you do not remember from your childhood
But came, instead, from mine;
It is this gift which draws me
One more time to the refrigerator
To break off a single square from the tinfoil paper
And hold the taste of our combination,
Of my memory, made stronger by your attention,
Inside my mouth.

Pretty Fictitious Film!

After S. and I discussed who our "favorite" (read: "people we think are hot") actors are in Holly- and Bollywood, I began to wonder what might transpire if they all ended up in a film together.

So, with the magic of image editing, I created the promo poster.

However, it looks much less "Hollywood" (or Bollywood, for that matter), and much more like a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

Ah, well.

And here it is:


The tagline (if it would fit onto the image without making it incredibly busy) would read:

Three travelers.
Three sexy accents.
Three different prices to get in.
One love story.

Shripriya, wanna direct? ^__^

The "Cloth Pads" Post

S. visited my apartment for the first time this weekend.

A friend called before S. came, and asked if I was "scrubbing everything," to which I responded "my apartment is always clean, thank you!" And it's true. The apartment is (thankfully) always clean and tidy, and so I only needed to do a few things like scrub the water spots off of the sink spigots.

There was one minor point of worry, though, and it had to do with the decorative ceramic jar that lives above the toilet. And... the tiny bit of white ribbon strung above the jar. And... um... the three pieces of cloth which were currently hanging cheerfully and colorfully from the ribbon.

I thought about taking the whole kit down, but figured he'd find out anyway soon enough, so I sucked in my breath, gave him the "grand tour" of the apartment and then paused by the bathroom.

"This is my..."

(Rather like Bridget Jones, my mind went "don't say menstruation station... don't say menstruation station...")

"This is where I keep my natural menstrual products -- please-don't-be-grossed-out!"

S. was extremely unfazed. He was the absolute absence of fazed. "Of course," he said. "It's like women do it in India."

So. Cloth pads. I feel like I should do a bit of an educational lecture, if only because they are so extraordinarily comfortable and functional and environmental and I want to recruit as many women as possible into jumping on the "natural menstrual products" bandwagon.

For those of you not interested in reading about the finer details of female hygiene, I've included a "barrier image" so your eyes might avoid looking past and reading anything you might find unsavory. It's a picture of a John Deere tractor. If you continue reading past the picture... be prepared for details.

Here it is:






All right... so y'all are my audience. Let's go!

I'm going to set this up as a question-and-answer, because it makes the most sense. It also makes me sound a bit like an advertising brochure, and that's pretty much what I'm doing.

When did you become interested in "natural menstrual products?"

Hmmm. I became interested about six months ago, for two reasons. First because of the Hyderabad trip. I was thinking "what can I do to take care of myself, travel, etc. without having to pack or buy a lot of bulky, cumbersome product?" And so I started doing a little research, and I ended up purchasing a Keeper, which is a reusable menstrual cup. Essentially one inserts the rubber cup into oneself, where it happily and quietly spends all day collecting blood, and at the end of the day one empties the Keeper into the toilet, washes it out, and pops it back in. (It's boiled at the end and at the beginning of every cycle for maximum cleanliness, but doesn't need anything but water between insertions.)

The Keeper, when it works, becomes then the only menstrual product needed. And it lasts for at least ten years.

But it doesn't work for every woman, and it didn't work for me, probably because I am very petite. However, by then I was totally committed to natural products (because of the second reason: eliminating waste, removing oneself from corporate sponsorship, and doing my bit for saving Mother Earth), and so I started looking at the other option: reusable cloth menstrual pads.

Okay. But I thought disposable products liberated women from the uncomfortable messiness of literally being "on the rag." Why go back to the rag?

Disposable products started out, perhaps, as liberating; but forty-odd years later they clog landfills and sewers, and force women to shell out thousands of dollars a year in what is essentially a captive market. They're another example of a corporate institution doing something we used to do ourselves, handling it badly, and then charging us for the privilege.

Not to mention that they're full of chemicals and dyes and all kinds of icky things.

Wearing cloth pads is not the same as shoving rags into one's pants. They're not rags. The typical cloth pad is made of a layer of fleece (very absorbent) on top of a layer of PUL (waterproof). The whole thing is encased in cotton or flannel or another soft, comfy fabric. Two "wings" snap around the panty and hold the whole thing in place.

In terms of environmental and social impact: cloth pads are reusable and have very little water drain (especially if washed by hand as I will mention later). They are also out of the corporate sphere and are exclusively made by women, by hand, in home-based workshops and businesses. The person making my cloth pads is a mother of two, who uses her income to allow her to stay home with her children.

Hmmm. Let's get the two big issues out of the way first. Leaks and smell.

(Do you wish you were looking at that tractor picture again? ^__^)

Leaks and smell are the two big issues which often make women uneasy about considering cloth. (The other issue is cleaning, which I will address in a moment.)

Since cloth pads are designed and made by women for women, they're done so with an eye to preventing both of the above. My pads, for example, have grooves sewn into them to prevent runoff. (Yep, told you I would get detailed.) The fleece-PUL combination, assisted by the "woman-friendly" design, has made the cloth pads the only products I've ever used which haven't leaked, particularly overnight.

As for smell... when changed as necessary they don't smell. In fact, they smell less than disposables, simply because the fleece sucks everything away below the outer cotton layer while disposables... um... let it all chill right there on the surface.

Cleaning. Eew?

Since I have a cat, I'm used to dealing with bodily waste. So... for me, no eww. For other people, maybe. It depends.

When you're changing a cloth pad, you can either wash it out right away or you can pop it into a ceramic container (no metal or glass; don't know about clay, etc.) filled with water and a little baking soda. Mine sits above my toilet and is shaped like a giant cabbage.

Changing at work: most cloth pads will fold up into themselves, forming a tiny envelope in which all the fluid is tucked away at the inside. They don't smell and can be kept discretely in a purse pocket (you know, that secret one) until one gets home. For added protection, they can be wrapped in, say, a plastic sandwich bag before they're stuffed into the purse.

Washing: If you purchase enough cloth pads (and a large enough ceramic jar) you could just wash them all in your washing machine at the end of your cycle. But that's a lot of pads. Chances are you'll be washing them by hand (because you wouldn't throw just two or three pads into your washing machine at the end of the day, would you? Promise me you wouldn't waste our precious natural resources in that way...).

To wash by hand: first, empty contents of ceramic jar into your toilet. (Don't let the pads fall in, ha ha.) This takes care of most of the liquid waste. Then grab one pad at a time, squirt on some liquid soap (I use the same body soap I use in the shower), lather, and rinse at the sink until the water runs clear.

Easy as pie and takes five minutes.

The harder part is drying, because those things have to dry somewhere, which means that they will be (gasp!) visible to the outside world. Mine line dry above the toilet, as hinted earlier, and they take about eight hours to dry. So the ones I wash in the morning will be ready for me when I get home from work, and the ones I wash at night will be ready when I wake up.

Well, I'm just about sold. But, pray tell, are there any other benefits?

Yes, and I'm so glad you asked!

In one word: comfort. You can't feel them (and neither can, say, your partner). They don't feel wet, they don't feel scratchy, they don't feel bulky. They feel like wearing underwear. No crinkling, no itching, no dried blood caught on the surface.

And they don't show through clothing!

Where do I sign up?

The best way to get your own cloth pads is through ebay. Just run a search for "cloth pads" and you'll start getting results.

However, since there are so many individual suppliers available, you might want to consider this guide before purchasing. It describes and evaluates nearly every home-based pad business on the market. (I use Punky's Pads and vouch thoroughly by their awesomeness.)

You can also make your own, if you're so inclined. Information can be found here.

And, finally, since y'all are online types, here's a whole community devoted to cloth pad use.

If you still have questions, feel free to ask in the comments. This infomercial has gone on quite long enough. Thanks for reading!