Reviews and contracts Love and Other Drugs and The Age of Wonder

I've long been aware on some subliminal level that novels and movies develop a certain contract with the viewer early on. It's often easier to identify in novels, but it generally has to do with prose and sentence construction. As a side bar, this blog makes a very simple contract with any reader: mistakes will be frequent, but the content generated tends to be more humorous rather than intellectually driven. Thus, when a mistake arises, though it may detract from an initial reading, it's not really a big deal. However, if I start reading a book and it has a sentence like, "He began running a long distance and was surprised not to feel a stitch in his side because he usually got short of breath while running a long distance and had trouble breathing." Well, I would expect you to conclude that the author had not been very careful with their sentences. And therefore, that you would not have to be very careful in your reading. Or better yet, you'd just put the damn thing down because the author didn't care enough to even write decent sentences.

This same contract operates in movies though it's sometimes harder to define. While I struggled with Paper Heart, I have no qualms about calling Love and Other Drugs a pretty crappy movie. However, a viewer doesn't suffer long in expecting anything big as one of the opening scenes involving the protagonist and his family is so incredibly formulaic, and awkward, almost reminiscent of Meet the Parents, though somewhat unintentionally, that you are aware that it's kind of going to suck.

Years ago I remember watching a episode of Ricky Gervais' show, The Extras, in which Kate Winslet plays a character acting in a Holocaust movie in order to win an Oscar. Ironically, six or so years after her turn in Extras as that woman seeking an Oscar by selling out, she appeared in the Reader, a Holocaust movie that helped her win an Oscar. I'm relaying the story in part because it was surprising and in part because it was surprising to see so much of Kate Winslet's chest in that movie. As my wife said during one of Love and Other Drugs many love scenes with a bare chested Anne Hathaway, "She was in the Princess Diaries." Yes, Anne Hathaway is topless an inordinate amount of times in this movie, and we discover that Jake Gylenhall is not out of shape, however, this does not manage to save the movie. The characters, right from that opening scene are destined to be overly simplistic, to deliver canned lines of dialogue to one another and generally act exactly you'd expect two people caught in an awkward love affair in a movie to act. Ie, not like real and specific people as in a very good movie like Blue Valentine, but like actors playing a role in a movie. And no amount of melodrama or shots of skin can redeem that contract that has been violated. The movie is not interested or interesting enough to show us real people, and therefore it fails. (Edit-the movie does get better towards the end, but it only makes you resent a lot of what has come before that deflate a potentially interesting scenario)

On the other hand, The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an in depth look at the evolution of science and its connection to the Romantic or pre-Victorian era is good from start to finish. The scientific geniuses have all been studies so intimately by Holmes, that we learn as much about their lives at home as we do about the discoveries that made them geniuses. On the other hand, this is the sort of book that will make a modern American feel guilty. I mean, William Herschel was interested in astronomy so he set about building his own homemade telescope that turned out to be an improvement upon the one at the Royal Academies, then he found a new planet, the unfortunately named Uranus. Anyhow, all I have to do to find a planet or our place in the solar system is use Google. This book is chalk full of hard working men who will make you feel a bit guilty about your addiction to reality television. The one exception might be Humphry Davy, but even he invented a lantern to help coal minders not get blown up by methane and almost discovered anesthesia before becoming more of a hunter and fisherman type.

One of the most intriguing things about the book was the interest that authors like Colerdige and Keats took in the new scientific discoveries. Coleridge in particular saw scientists and artists as inextricably linked rather than as adversaries. A very small part of me was also jealous that people in the day and age still had places to explore. Caveat that many of the places they were "exploring" already had inhabitants. And so, perhaps it's just one more inducement to travel. Anyhow, whether it is Sir. Joseph Banks practicing free love in Tahiti, Herschel watching the stars, or Mungo Park wandering into the interior of Africa, this book is rich with both ideas and characters.

The proof is found in the pudding. I find pudding distasteful.

From the journal of Sir Joseph Banks in the late 18th century on his reflections about Tahiti:

From them appear how small are the real wants of human nature, which we Europeans have increased to an excess which would certainly appear incredible to these people to be told it. Nor shall we cease to increase them as long as Luxuries can be invented and riches found or the purchase of them; and how soon these Luxuries degenerate into necessaries may be sufficiently evidenced by the universal use of strong liquors, Tobacco, Tea, et. etc."

And if we're not getting fascinating stuff like a journal from 250 years ago sounding eerily like the laments of today, then I'm learning that the Andromeda galaxy is going to one day collide or join the Milky Way. I mean, if I last 3 billion years, I'm going to be excited to see what happens there.

A description of the possible outcomes of ballooning by Horace Walpole. Ballooning was the original X game and also the first time that man was able to fly. One of my favorite stories from this section involves two men shedding all their clothes and defecating to drop enough weight to clear some cliffs. Walpole: "How posterity will laugh at us one way or another! If half a dozen break their necks, and Ballonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use. If it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted."

We see in the lectures of Humphry Davy, after he was done proclaiming how great taking Nitrous Oxide was, that connection between Romanticism and Science. Davy: "Man, in what is called a state of nature, is a creature of almost pure sensation. Called into activity only by positive wants, his life is passed either in satisfying the cravings of the common appetitites, or in apathy, or in slumber. Living only in moments he calculates little on futurity, He has no vivid feelings of hope, or thoughts of permanent and powerful actions. and unable to discover causes, he is either harassed by superstitious dreams, or quietly and passively submissive to the mercy of nature and the elements. But once woken by science, man is capable of connecting hope with an infinite variety of ideas. Above all science enables him to shape his future, actively."

That's it I'm volunteering to colonize Mars.

Coleridge: "If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, the Poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself."

Humphry Davy towards the tail end of his life when he was writing, fishing, and taking morphine, ah sweet life:

"The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth."

The book also has a nice passage about Mungo Park traveling through Africa and writing variant letters to people at the same time. Ie, honey I'll be home to the wife, and, I'll probably die here to the head of the Royal Society. The book has a chapter about Frankenstein, largely based upon the use of voltaic batteries on animals and briefly on humans during this time period, in which it was shown that a person's limbs could still move about if they had a current running through them even after death. Though, to be fair, the scientist who took up this practice wound up going crazy and killing himself. Anyhow, the point is that it's a good book, and I didn't think I'd be recommending late eighteenth and early nineteenth century science history to anyone, but I am!