Heartburn & Paris Etc

I never seem to read anything in sequence for book group anymore.  Wrong book for the wrong meeting, or I have to go home because I was falling asleep because I spent three hundred hours of my life filling in forms for the government to satisfy itself that I am doing my job (generally ensuring that I don't have time to do my job) or some other thing.

So here is my record.  Not even all about books.  After the wonderful America is not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, I read Nora Ephron's Heartburn, (originally published c.1983 and recently reissued by Virago Classics, for the first time.

After reading almost everything I could find about Elaine Castillo after finishing her novel, this is what stuck in my mind:
What is striking about “America Is Not the Heart” is how it’s unapologetically Filipino, peppered with expressions in Ilocano, Pangasinan, and Tagalog and nuances like wearing tsinelas, calling everyone Ate, faith healing -- with no italics, no footnotes, no glossary of terms, something Castillo is adamant about.
“I’m not writing ethnography. There’s plenty of books on middle class white life in Brooklyn – I don’t know what that’s like – and they don’t provide glossaries for me. I don’t really see why I should provide glossaries, and in doing so otherize my stake in American reality, which should be taken as such,” Castillo emphasizes.  (source: ABS-CBN News)
Heartburn is set in precisely the world of privilege Castillo references, which was offputting.  It's a funny and well-written story of a marriage breakup, based on the author's own experiences.  I didn't finish it with lingering thoughts.
Paris Etc. is my new love.  I've just finished the 12 episode season on Lightbox and I hope they make another one.  If you usually start watching Lightbox in front of short people, or at work, or on the train, I shall warn you now that every episode starts with a sex scene.  I started watching idly and then I was more and more interested.  None of the five women are heroes.  Each episode goes deeper into the complexities of their motivations and challenges and responses and I liked how they were not always likeable.  The cinematography is gorgeous.  Lots of views looking down on Paris streets echoing how we were looking down into the lives of the five protagonists, and parallel shots of each of the separate women echoing each other unknowingly.
So now I *need* a new series to binge-watch to celebrate my temporary release from bureaucratic bondage, and to go to the library, cos' I spent my book buying budget all up.  In the meantime, I have a choice between the latest NZ Gardener magazine (because I lacked budgetary constraint at the supermarket today) or an article on how we are killing ourselves being sedentary and fat from yesterday's Press newspaper.  I think the latter can light the fire instead.
Anyways, I've been going to yoga almost every week for six months.  This is a lifetime record of commitment to exercise for me.  
I have started a new sewing project.  It's black and unsuited to pub crawls.  But as I gave up pub crawls some time last century and then I became a mother and torturer of young people, that is not relevant.
If Marianne Faithfull was writing 'The Ballad of Lucy Jordan' now, do you think Lucy would still be 37?  Personally, I think she would be 46.  Lucy had her kids younger (I have decided).  Though now I go back to the lyrics, they are darker than I remembered.  I recall it as her dropping everything and running away.  Not committing suicide.  Though I have a talent for missing multiple layers of meaning.  Don't ask me how I earn money.  Filling in forms does not require an understanding of multiple layers of meaning.

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