Chance's Corner: My Summer with Bergman

I don't have the time or the money to go on a real vacation (thanks student loans!), but I was able to squeeze in a cinematic vacation. A cinematic vacation? Yes, I took a vacation by watching some films, particularity films that exuded a summer vibe. Two of those films were directed by the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who is best known for The Seventh Seal, the film where the Grim Reaper plays chess, and Persona, a haunting examination of converging identities. However, for my cinematic vacation, I picked two films from earlier in his career, Summer with Monika and Summer Interlude. Here's how those two "trips" to the Stockholm archipelago went:

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Summer with Monika

I'm not sure why I expected a sunny coming of age film from Bergman. His films are usually cold, dark and weighty, and while young love does seem to blossom between teenagers Harry and Monika (Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson), things do take an icy turn. Honestly, it took me awhile to get interested in this film. I was about halfway into the second act when it finally clicked with me. I could sense something was happening - something that wasn't just about young love. It's disintegration, and I'm a sucker for disintegration à la Bergman. Love is peeled away to resemble something akin to only lust, and Monika is slowly revealed to be an absolute devil (and that's putting it nicely). Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh on her because I've rushed into feelings before, which ended in emotional turmoil, but I haven't screwed up this bad. Anyways, her future is not made clear, and neither is Harry's, but what is made clear is that they'll be carrying the emotional scars for a very long time.

Summer Interlude

Through a series of flashbacks, Summer Interlude takes us back to the Stockholm archipelago, where we're treated to the blossoming love between a different set of teenagers, Henrik (Birger Malmsten) AKA the Swedish Jack Palance and the ballerina Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson). They spend every waking second together swimming, canoeing, eating wild strawberries, and kissing in front of Henrik's faithful dog Gruffman. Ah, young love - an almost unstoppable force. Almost. Bergman may be paying for the trip, but Henrik and Marie will end up paying the ultimate price. Why? That's life, apparently.

Summer Interlude is widely considered to be a turning point in Bergman's career - a point that hints at the themes of his later masterworks, which include isolation and the power of the past and memory. It's also considerably one of his warmer films, well... warm to a point. As the summer ends, the world grows cold, as does Marie, and Bergman's themes hit with full force in the third act. I can't help but feel that the third act carries on too long, though, especially when the clown/magician full of put-downs comes into play. Yes, there's a clown, and he's really a jerk! Despite the clown, Marie is able to come to terms with life and the past, and manages to find a bittersweet ending.
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And that was my summer with Bergman! It was kind of a miserable experience, but when Bergman makes you miserable, it's good?

Julie's Journal : Epic Road Trip!

This year, my husband and I wanted to take some time and see the Rocky Mountains.  I had never been much further west than Fort Worth and neither of us had been very far north.  So after he was finished with Summer School and when Summer Reading was winding down at the library, we took off in his truck to see the sights.  Over the next 12 days we went to 10 states and 5 national parks and traveled 4,456 miles!

We saw mountains and rivers and wildlife, along with buttes and farmland and waterfalls.  We went through canyons and drove above the tree line.  We mostly avoided the cities and tried to avoid crowds, although that proved impossible at Yellowstone!

Grand Teton National Park

We were able to hand feed Chipmunks and Ground Squirrels at St. Elmo, CO.

We saw hot springs and Old Faithful at Yellowstone.  Old Faithful was extremely crowded, so my pictures aren't very good.

We saw moose, elk, beaver, geese, otter, black bears, bison, mule deer, and lots of other wildlife.  We were on a quest to find a grizzly bear, but we weren't successful.

After Yellowstone, we cut across Montana and the Dakotas and stopped at Mt. Rushmore.  We weren't sure how much would be there, but if you ever get a chance to go, we recommend it.  There is a viewing platform and a museum that is very well done.  The day we visited Mt. Rushmore was the only day that it rained on us, or we might have done the walking trail as well.

From there, we headed south towards home.  Our last tourist stop was at The Pioneer Woman Mercantile in Oklahoma.  I've followed The Pioneer Woman's blog for years, so it was a fun stop for me.  

We were exhausted when we got home, but the trip went by in a hurry.  It's hard to believe that after all the time we spent planning, it's already over.  We added to our memories and expanded our horizons, though, which is what travel is all about!

Our route - marked out by my mother as we traveled.

Tom's Two Cents : Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner is not a familiar name in 20th century literary annals, though he probably should be. He is part of that second-tier group of mid-century writers that included William Styron, John Updike, and others, who were highly respected for their craft, but who did not make it into the top literary critical echelon.  Were they good?  You bet—maybe at times better than the critical darlings like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.  Stegner was a mid-westerner, who ultimately settled in California, where he taught creative writing for a good many years, producing writer/students like our own Larry McMurtry.  His last two novels, this one, and his last, Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer, are considered his best, although there is a respectable body of work before that.

Crossing to Safety touched a particular chord in me.  The principal characters are two couples, Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally, couples who meet in the 30’s, both men striving for position and tenure in a small New England college, where they form an enduring friendship.  This academic scene took me immediately back to my first four years of teaching English at Southern Methodist, fraught with all the same positives and negatives, especially those of a would-be creative writer, striving for recognition in a field, English, that normally came from publishing critical essays, not poems or stories or novels.  Larry, who tells this story, becomes a successful novelist, as he watches his conflicted colleague, Sid, a “wannabe” poet, being pushed into Traditional Academia by his ambitious wife, Charity, the central focus of this novel, even though her female foil, Sally, seems to have a much more momentous problem in her lifelong struggle with polio.

Charity, who seems to have few problems, is the focus of this novel, and we all know her type, indeed we may be her type, live with her type, or struggle with friends of her type.  She is the Classic Control Freak, who must, simply MUST, manage everyone’s life to the nth degree.  To compound the frustration of dealing with her, she is also smart, loving and generous to a fault. Stegner beautifully traces the relationship of these four to its final conclusion.  Though this book is short on plot and long on the subtlety of its character relationships, it is beautifully written in the kind of prose one seldom finds anymore and substantive in its praise of enduring friendship, the thing, as Robert Frost is quoted from, that “I have crossed to safety with” and “what I would not part with” that “I have kept.”