The Connie Willis . Net Blog

WEBSITE UPDATE–HALLOWEEN–2018
CONNIE WILLIS’S RECOMMENDED READING (AND VIEWING) LIST FOR HALLOWEEN  FOR COWARDS LIKE HER
I love Halloween, but at the same time I hate slasher movies, Saw-type movies, blood, gore, dismemberment, and even Stephen King’s THE SHINING.  (See gore.)  And I assume there are other people out there just like me who might like a list of things to see and read that aren’t any of the above, especially this year when the blood and gore–and dismemberment–are out there in the real world and impossible to forget.
I’m not forgetting them AT ALL, but I also know people sometimes people need something to take their minds off the horrors of the real world, at least for a little while.  So here’s a list of stories and movies that are spooky and shivery that you might have missed:

SHORT STORIES
“The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson–What happens if you decide to stay behind in your cabin when summer’s over?  I mean, there’s no real reason to go home, is there?
“Homecoming” by Ray Bradbury–A traditional Halloween story with witches and ghosts and goblins and vampires, but with a twist.  (Note:  This is probably my favorite Ray Bradbury story.)
“Horrer Howce” by Margaret St. Clair–Amusement parks keep upgrading to provide scarier and scarier rides.  Where DO they get their ideas?
“Evening Primrose” by John Collier–Have you ever wondered what happens in a department store after it closes?  (Note:  This was made into a lovely one-act musical with haunting Stephen Sondheim songs.)
“The Exiles” by Ray Bradbury–Where do all those witches and monsters go when nobody reads them anymore?
And two classics: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe

NOVELS
THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE by Shirley Jackson–The book.  Not the movie called THE HAUNTING, though it’s not bad, or the movie called THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which   was terrible, or the new series called THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which isn’t the same story at all.  The book!
THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO by Charles Finney–One of the strangest and creepiest novels I’ve ever come across.  It reminded me of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by RayBradbury (which was actually written later.)  I recommend both.
ALL HALLOW’S EVE by Charles Williams–I’ve recommended this before.  It begins with the heroine, Lester, standing on Westminster Bridge, looking across the Thames at the plane crash in which she has just been killed, and follows her through a London of the dead.
WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE by Shirley Jackson–The creepiest novel of all  time.  Do not read late at night.

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THE OTHERS–This Nicole Kidman is my favorite Halloween movie!  I don’t want to say anything else for fear of giving something away.  When I saw it, I knew nothing about it, and that was the perfect way to see it!
WHAT LIES BENEATH–It has Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford and a next-door neighbor who   may or may not have been murdered and be haunting their house.       BETWEEN TWO WORLDS– An ocean liner is crossing from England to America during World War II.  Or is that where it’s really going?  This is the remake of a 1930s film called OUTWARD BOUND,  which was made from the book (and the play), OUTWARD BOUND, by Sutton Vance.

And for fun:
THE ADDAMS FAMILY–Girl Scout:  “Are there real lemons in your lemonade?”  Wednesday:  “Are there real Girl Scouts in your Girl Scout cookies?”  ‘Nuff said.
GHOST TOWN–Like THE SIXTH SENSE, only the dentist who’s stuck seeing dead people hates   them.  It’s got Ricky Gervaise, Tea Leoni and Greg Kinnear.  And Kirsten Wiig, in one of the funniest scenes ever.   And, believe it or not, it’s a romantic comedy!
THE RAVEN–This 1963 movie, which stars Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre, is great.  Vincent Price to the raven:  Can’st thou tell me of my lost Lenore?  Where, oh, where is my lost Lenore?   Raven:  How the hell would I know?
Oh, and if you want to read something of mine, I recommend:

PASSAGE

LINCOLN’S DREAMS

and “Service for the Burial Dead.”

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Connie Willis

WEBSITE UPDATE–STORY CORPS
May 6, 2018

We just returned from the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales, New Mexico. As usual, it was wonderful–it’s always my favorite convention of the year. I love the luncheon (S.M. Stirling spoke this year), the panels, and the forensics lectures my daughter gives (this year’s was on the Sierra LaMar case.) And I love the chance to see old friends like Betty Williamson and Gene Bundy. But this year, there was an additional highlight: NPR’s StoryCorps.

For those of you who haven’t heard of StoryCorps, it’s a project National Public Radio embarked on in 2003 to record conversations between people and create an oral history of ordinary people and their experiences. They’ve recorded thousands of 40-minute-long conversations of parents and children, siblings, friends, and every other possible combination of people on every possible topic. I’ve heard people talk about a teacher who helped them, a father they didn’t get along with, the person who saved their life, diving into freezing water to rescue them as a baby, and the parole officer who sent them back to prison. They talk about their jobs, their childhoods, the Holocaust, the Depression, the World Trade Center, their college days, and everything else under the sun. The most recent one I heard was about two people who met and fell in love at a nudist colony.

NPR plays snippets of them on Morning Edition every Friday. Listening to them invariably makes me laugh. Or cry. Or both. The full conversations are archived in the Library of Congress and at the StoryCorps website, where you can listen to them.

Just before we left for the Lectureship, Betty called and said the StoryCorps van was in Portales for a month and asked me if I’d be willing to record a conversation with her about Jack. I jumped at the chance. I loved Jack Williamson, and the chance to help preserve the memory of his importance as a writer and his intelligence and kindness as a human being was irresistible, and we had a wonderful conversation about him, discussing the man she knew as Uncle Jack and the man I knew as a science fiction giant and founder of the field–and as a friend.

When Betty called, she mentioned StoryCorps was having trouble finding volunteers, so I asked her to reserve the next slot for me, my husband, and our daughter, so we could talk about our trips to the total solar eclipse in 1979 and the one last year and how much they meant to us.sildenafil tablet viagra Cosmic Health has got highest awards on shows in Brussels (1999), Moscow (2001) and Parish (2000). If you cialis india discount take it personally, then you can contact your doctor. They already had developed tolerance to free samples levitra alcohol that they can’t dare miss even a single shot. A new study suggests overall assessment of an impotent cialis online mastercard man.

Our conversations will be archived at the Library of Congress and at the StoryCorps website. I just checked, and they’re not up yet, but you’ll eventually be able to listen to the interviews here:

https://storycorps.org

And if a StoryCorps van comes to your area, I encourage you to sign up. You can talk about anything you want to–your love of books or science fiction, a person who made a difference in your life, or your hobby. Or you can reminisce with a friend or a sibling or an old roommate. It’s a wonderful experience, and a chance to be an active part of history.

Connie Willis

MY FAVORITE BOOKS:
THE BOOK YOU FORGOT YOU LOVED

I was doing some research on the attack on Coventry the other day and thought I remembered there being something about it at the end of C.S. Lewis’s novel THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, so I decided to read the book again.

I hadn’t read Lewis since college, when I’d adored him. In fact, he was the first of the Inklings I discovered. (If you’re not familiar with the Inklings, they were an informal group of Oxford writers with a bent for fantasy and religion who met and discussed each others’ work both in C.S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and in the pub, The Eagle and Child. They included Lewis, his brother Warren, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield, and an assortment of other writers.)

I can’t remember which of Lewis’s books I read first, probably THE GREAT DIVORCE, and I immediately devoured all of them, from THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS to TILL WE HAVE FACES and the PERELANDRA trilogy, of which THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH is the third and final volume. (Somehow I didn’t find out about the Narnia books till much later, and when I did, I was lukewarm about them. Sorry, Aslan fans!)

Anyway, as a college student I thought he was wonderful, and it killed me that I was born too late to be part of the Inklings (which I was sure they would have let me join).

But as time went on, I grew disenchanted with him. I began to find his writing pretentious and preachy, and when I found out he hadn’t let Dorothy Sayers join the Inklings either (it was men only), that he was generally dismissive of her (he hated GAUDY NIGHT and her detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, writing, “I conceived a loathing for him not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet”), and that, after declaring that woman’s place was in the home, he’d insisted HIS wife be at every meeting, my ardor for him began to cool.

In the meantime, I had discovered Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS, oddly enough not through Lewis or the Inklings. In one of the luckiest incidents of my life, I happened on his books (the paperbacks with the surreal-looking pink and blue covers) while looking for something to read on a plane. I was flying to Connecticut to break off my engagement to my boyfriend, and I needed something long and distracting to read on the transcontinental flight. I say lucky because from the first words, I was completely hooked, and by the time I got off the plane I was deep in Middle Earth. “Oh, my gosh,” I breathlessly told my fiancee, “Frodo and Sam are in so much trouble. The Black Riders are after them, and Gandalf’s missing, and I don’t know whether to trust this Strider guy or not,” and completely forgot to break up with him. We have now been married fifty years and counting.

Anyway, Tolkien’s world was infinitely rich and complex, with a history that reached back for aeons, and his view of how the spiritual world worked was much less simple and straightforward than Lewis’s: Good didn’t always win out, evil was never fully vanquished, the best intentions could lead to disaster, and EVERYTHING came with a price.

And then, through him, I discovered Charles Williams, the third of the Inklings, and eventually my favorite. His books were full of strange and wonderful premises–a London of the dead, a tarot deck whose figures came to life, the Holy Grail found in an English country church–and full of ideas were even more nuanced and thought-provoking than Tolkien’s. C.S. Lewis began to seem Sunday-schoolish and simplistic in retrospect, and over time I began to think of him as an author I’d outgrown.

And then I reread THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.

It was like when you’ve lost touch with a friend, and in the time you’ve been apart, you’ve focused more and more on the memory of their irritating habits to the point that now you can’t remember why you hung around them in the first place. And then you see them again and suddenly you remember why you were friends and how terrific they are.

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That’s what it was like for me and C.S. Lewis. Reading the novel, I remembered all the things I’d loved about him.

For starters, there was his fellows’ meeting at the college, in which things seemed harmless enough on the surface, but there were currents underneath–euphemisms and manipulation and playing one person against another, and a second, secret agenda that was never mentioned–and what seemed to be happening and what was really going on were two COMPLETELY different things. Anyone who’s ever sat through a meeting will recognize Lewis’s–and squirm

There was also Lewis’s understanding of how evil actually works–not by villains rubbing their hands and plotting world domination, but by them working on people’s fears and desires, and their inertia, the schoolboyish need to be part of the “in” group, the fear of being considered stupid or uncool or behind the times, the willingness to go along with things until suddenly you’re past the point of no return. The characters Curry and Feverstone were suavely terrifying, and Withers, with his slow, harmless-sounding talk that means nothing at all, was the epitome of evil.

And then there’s Merlin, newly released from his tomb after centuries, brusque and violent and utterly unlike the Merlins of Malory or EXCALIBUR or Mary Stewart, and yet totally authentic. And full of commentary on the strange new time he finds himself in: “You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it,” he complains. “I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon.”

The whole book is full of thought-provoking things like that. There are insights on every page that you want to stop and think about. And even when you completely disagree with what he’s saying (like, for instance, his assessment of what a bear would perceive and what women’s place in society is), it’s still interesting, like having a stimulating argument with a friend.

Finally, there’s his sheer storytelling skill. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH he tells us first about Jane and her disturbing dreams (and they ARE disturbing) and then switches to her husband Mark and the equally disturbing efforts to sell Merlin’s Well, alternating their stories for maximum effect. I found myself staying up late to read just one more chapter and then another, and another, just like I had in college.

This is not to say I don’t still have problems with Lewis. His relegation of women to home and hearth may be normal for someone writing in the 1940s and living in the exclusively male environment of an Oxford college, but his insistence that God agrees with him on this puts it in a whole other category (though even there, he does make Jane the hero of THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, not her husband).

Lewis also frequently lets his desire to promote his own beliefs take over the story. And too much of the book’s climax takes place offstage. But I still loved the book.

The irony in all of this is that I had misremembered the part about Coventry that prompted me to read THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH in the first place. The flight from Edgestow only faintly resembled the exodus from Coventry, (though it may well have inspired Lewis’s story) and all the innocent bystanders definitely did not miraculously escape, as they do in the book.

But I’m still glad I reread it, and now I can’t wait to go back and read PERELANDRA and OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET and THE GREAT DIVORCE and THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS–to see what else I’ve forgotten.

Connie Willis

FIVE THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE TITANIC

It’s April fifteenth, the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. You’d think we’d know everything about the sinking by now, after all the books and movies (and Broadway musicals), but that’s not true.
Here are some things you may not know about the Titanic:

1. THERE WAS A PSYCHIC ON BOARD.

The well-known spiritualist, W.T. Stead, who claimed to be telepathic and clairvoyant and to have received all sorts of messages from the Other Side, was on the Titanic. But, I mean, how good could he have really been? If he was really psychic, he’d have known the ship was going to sink and would have taken another ship.

2. MOLLY BROWN WAS EVEN MORE OF A HERO THAN YOU MAY BE AWARE OF.

As you probably know from THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN (the less said about the misbegotten movie, TITANIC, the better), she gave the passengers in her lifeboat her fur coat and the rest of her clothes and then, stripped down to her underwear, kept their spirits up by singing songs she’d learned in her saloon days in Leadville.

She did NOT brandish a gun, but she tried desperately to get the crewman in charge of the boat to go back and pick up the passengers in the water, to no avail. (In his defense, he was afraid the boat would be swamped and/or overturned when they tried to climb aboard), and after trying to persuade him, she threatened to throw him overboard.

But it was once safely aboard the Carpathia that she really began to shine. She helped the crew identify the passengers. She knew several languages (as you know from THE UNSINKABLE MOLLY BROWN), and she used them to find out who the rescued immigrant women and children were, to comfort them (they’d just lost their husbands and fathers), and to see if they had any relatives who could help them when they got to New York.

She also started up a fund for them, and when the richer passengers didn’t pitch in, she posted a giant sign in the ship’s dining room headed, “The following people have not donated,” with a list of their names below. By the next meal, everyone on board had coughed up a donation. Over all, she raised ten thousand dollars for them, but she was still not done.

When the ship docked in New York City, she put the immigrants up in hotels at her own expense, worked tirelessly to contact their families and friends, and didn’t leave town till every single one of them had either been reunited with loved ones or had been put on a train (also at her expense) to where those relatives were.

When she finally made it back to Denver, she definitely deserved all the press declaring her to be a hero and the warm welcome she got. Later on she went to Halifax to lay wreaths on the graves of those whose bodies had been recovered, and gave medals to the captain and crew of the Carpathia. A true heroine!

2. LIEUTENANT LIGHTOLLER WAS A HERO TWICE OVER.

Charles Herbert Lightoller was the second officer on the Titanic. As soon as he realized the ship was sinking, he began getting the women and children into the lifeboats, working hard to launch and lower the boats on the port side. When all the boats were gone, he began working to free the collapsible canvas boats tethered to the top of the officers’ quarters. He was attempting to untie Collapsible B from the roof when the bow of the boat went under and he was swept, along with the lifeboat, into the water. (Later on, at the American inquiry, a senator, attempting to accuse him of dereliction of duty, asked him, “When did you leave the ship?” Lightoller replied, “I didn’t leave the ship, Senator. The ship left me.”)

Once in the water, Lightoller swam to the now upside-down Collapsible B, crawled on top of it, helped others climb aboard, and then somehow kept it afloat till the Carpathia got there, shouting directions to the men to shift their weight in response to the swells and keep the boat from capsizing. He was the last person to board the rescue ship, waiting till the very end to make sure every last person was saved.

He then went on to have a successful career on other ships, served in the Royal Navy in World War I, and sank a U-boat. He retired just in time for the evacuation from Dunkirk, when he took his yacht, one of his sons, and a teenaged Sea Scout across the Channel to rescue over 120 soldiers.

When I saw the movie Dunkirk, I said, “I’ll bet the grandfather in the movie was based on Lightoller, and it was, right down to the aircraft evasion maneuver he used, which had been taught to him by his youngest son, and that youngest son’s having been killed earlier in the war.

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3. THERE WERE DOZENS OF OTHER HEROES

The Titanic was full of heroes, some famous, others unknown. Like the man who was helping load the boats when a woman and her twelve-year-old son came up. “He can’t go. He’s too old,” the crewman loading the boats said. The man grabbed a hat off the head of a nearby woman, clapped it on the boy’s head, and said, “There! Now he’s a girl, and now he can go.”

And the second-class passenger who, when he realized the ship was sinking, went below and released all the animals from their kennels, including a champion bulldog who was later seen paddling gamely in the freezing water. When I’ve told this story, some people’s response to it is, “So what? It didn’t do any good,” but I don’t hold with the idea that good deeds only count when they succeed in the desired outcome, and at least they didn’t drown in their cages.

4. NOT EVERYBODY ON BOARD BEHAVED AS WELL AS THEY DID.

There were many brave people that night, from 22-year-old Edith Evans, who gave up her place in the last boat to a mother to the stokers who kept the fires going and the lights on till the very end, knowing that if they did, they wouldn’t have a chance to get out themselves, but not everybody was a hero.

J. Bruce Ismay, for instance. He was the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, along to bask in the glory of the Titanic’s maiden voyage. When it began to sink, however, he promptly got in a lifeboat and became one of the few men who survived the disaster. At the hearings afterward, he claimed he had a perfect right to do so–he was a passenger and not a crew member, and thus had every right to try to save his own life, a truly wretched excuse.

Even worse, once aboard the Carpathia, he demanded a cabin all to himself and spent the harrowing trip home sedated so he didn’t have to face the other, orphaned and widowed survivors. And worst of all, as the investigations proceeded, it became obvious he had 1) limited the number of lifeboats on board (he thought they ruined the view on the boat deck) and 2) ordered the ship to go full speed ahead through the ice field so the Titanic could set a speed record on her maiden voyage and become famous.

She became famous, all right, and so did he. He was branded a coward and was vilified in the press. As one newspaper put it, “Mr. Ismay cares for nobody but himself. He leaves his ship to sink with the powerless cargo of lives and does not care to lift his eyes.” he was shunned by friends, bombarded with hate mail, and forced to become a complete recluse. His reputation never recovered, and he’s gone down (deservedly so) as the villain of the Titanic.

On a lesser scale of criminality, there was also the nameless passenger, whose remains (sort of) were found when the ship was located in the 1980s. Among the treasures brought up was a little heap of necklaces, brooches, and rings which had been found lying in a stateroom. One of the passengers had obviously taken the opportunity of everyone being up on the boat deck to break into their staterooms and steal their jewelry. Not that it did him any good. The recovery team concluded that the things were in the pocket of his pants, which had long since ratted away. So had he.

5. JUST BECAUSE PEOPLE WERE CRIMINALS DIDN’T MEAN THEY HAD TO ACT LIKE IT.

But not all the crooks on board behaved badly. A gambler who regularly worked the boats, travelling back and forth to play cards with the passengers and cheat them out of their money labored manfully to put lifebelts on people and load the boats. He made no attempt to board one himself, but when the last boat on his side was being lowered, he suddenly darted forward and handed a letter to a woman in the boat, asking her to deliver it to his sister. It told her simply that he was on the Titanic, an essential message since he was travelling under an alias, and no one would ever have known what happened to him otherwise. It reminded me of countless noble card sharps and con men in literature, like the gambler in the 1939 movie, STAGECOACH, whom I had always thought were romanticized but who I now realized might have been based on real-life heroes.

When I wrote PASSAGE, my novel about near-death experiences and the Titanic, I read every book
I could find on the subject. The best one (except for first-hand encounters and UNSINKABLE: R.M.S. TITANIC by Daniel Butler) is still the first one ever written: Walter Lord’s A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. It captures the panic, the heroism, the tragedy, and the meaning of the sinking better than anything written since.

That’s because so many of the other books on the sinking have an agenda: the sinking represented the downfall of the British Empire or the horror of class inequalities or the flaws of capitalism and greed. It does all those, of course, but that isn’t why it immediately captured the public’s fascination and has never let go. It was bigger and more universal than all those things. As John William Foster, the author of THE TITANIC COMPLEX put it. The reason we cannot stop talking about the great liner is because the Titanic is about everything.”

THE ONION once put a picture of the Titanic on its front page with a headline that read: WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR SINKS,, which is funny, but also true. But it’s not a metaphor for greed or women’s suffrage or British notions of chivalry. It’s a symbol of something larger–of fate, of death, of how we’re going along, blithely thinking we’re going somewhere, only to come up against a hard and inexorable reality. And face to face with ourselves.
\
Connie Willis

SOME GREAT ROMANTIC COMEDIES FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

Anyone who knows me knows I adore romantic comedies, and Valentine’s Day seems like a good time to share some of them with you. (NOTE: I’m not talking about romances. They’re a totally different genre. So fear not, you won’t find any BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY or Nicholas Sparks stuff here.)

I’m talking about romantic comedy, which has wit, charm, banter, and, most important, banter. It treats men and women as equal partners rather than seducer and seducee or conqueror and conquest, and it frequently turns romantic tropes like flowers, rings, and weddings, on their heads. Romantic comedies are about forging relationships whose hallmarks are honesty, humor, selflessness, teamwork, and bringing out the best in each other.

And it’s a genre that’s wildly underappreciated. People sneer at them as “rom-coms” and dismiss the whole genre as contrived and unrealistic. And yet Shakespeare wrote lots of them, and so did Jane Austen, and the classic screwball comedies remain popular to this day, while the dramas of the time are virtually unwatchable. And great ones continue to be made today. You just have to look for them. (NOTE: There are also a lot of terrible ones out there, which is why romantic comedies have such a bad name. I know. I have watched all of them. Many Bothans died to bring you this list.)

So here’s the list, divided into convenient categories for you, including my top ten favorites of all time. But watch them all–and have a happy Valentine’s Day!

THE CLASSIC ERA

Screwball comedies emerged with the coming of the talkies
and were brilliant all through the thirties and forties:

HIS GIRL FRIDAY
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
BRINGING UP BABY
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
THE MORE THE MERRIER
THE LADY EVE
BALLS OF FIRE
MY MAN GODFREY
MY FAVORITE WIFE
THE AWFUL TRUTH
NINOTCHKA
THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR
THE THIN MAN
THE DARK AGES

In the fifties, Doris Day and Rock Hudson got hold of the
romantic comedy, and it took the genre a long time to re-
cover. In the meantime, good ones were in short supply,
though there were still a few around:

HOW TO STEAL A MILLION
FATHER GOOSE
WALK, DON’T RUN
THE AFRICAN QUEEN
THE APARTMENT
THAT TOUCH OF MINK
CACTUS FLOWER
WHAT’S UP, DOC?
HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE
_____________________________________________________________________

THE MODERN ERA

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY
YOU’VE GOT MAIL
SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE
FRENCH KISS
PRETTY WOMAN
SABRINA
ROMANCING THE STONE
FEVER PITCH
ROXANNE
WORKING GIRL
RUNAWAY BRIDE
LEAP YEAR
SWEET HOME ALABAMA
L.A. STORY
SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS
MISS CONGENIALITY
THE WEDDING SINGER
FOR LOVE OR MONEY
NEW IN TOWN
GHOST TOWN
OVERBOARD

__________________________________________________________________

THE BRITS

For some reason, probably their understated approach
to emotion and their sense of irony, the British are way
better at this stuff than we are, and rate a whole
separate category.

WIMBLEDON
THE DECOY BRIDE
NOTTING HILL
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY
JACK AND SARAH

AND THE AUSSIES
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The Australians aren’t bad at it either:

STRICTLY BALLROOM
CROCODILE DUNDEE
PAPERBACK HERO

_____________________________________________________________________

THE REAL CLASSICS

Romantic comedies didn’t start with the movies, though
they’re a perfect medium for them, and Shakespeare et al,
have taken full advantage of that:

Jane Austen’s EMMA
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
PERSUASION
NORTHANGER ABBEY
CLUELESS (modern version of EMMA)
BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (modern version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE)
BRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Shakespeare’s TWELFTH NIGHT
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
AS YOU LIKE IT
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (modern version of
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW)

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

Willam Goldman’s THE PRINCESS BRIDE

Dorothy L. Sayer’s STRONG POISON
HAVE HIS CARCASE
GAUDY NIGHT

E.M. Forster’s A ROOM WITH A VIEW

SOME THAT ARE CHRISTMAS MOVIES TOO

I’ve listed these before, as Christmas movies, but they’re
great romantic comedies, too:

THE SURE THING
LOVE, ACTUALLY
CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT
BACHELOR MOTHER
THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
_____________________________________________________________________

SOME YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD OF

THE BIG SICK
STATE AND MAIN
THE REWRITE
LAST CHANCE HARVEY
NEW IN TOWN
ALL OF ME
FEVER PITCH
RETURN TO ME
HE SAID, SHE SAID
LOVE HAPPENS
FOOLS RUSH IN
PICTURE PERFECT
MORNING GLORY
SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

AND MY TOP 10, WELL, ACTUALLY 12, NO, WAIT, 13,FAVORITES OF ALL TIME
In no particular order:

1. STRICTLY BALLROOM
2. HOW TO STEAL A MILLION
3. WALK, DON’T RUN
4. SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE
5. GHOST TOWN
6. THE LADY EVE
7. NOTTING HILL
8. FATHER GOOSE
9. WIMBLEDON
10. OVERBOARD
11. HIS GIRL FRIDAY
12. JACK AND SARAH

THANKS ON THANKSGIVING

Last Thanksgiving my daughter said she was making a list of people she was thankful for.  It wasn’t the usual list of family and friends and mentors and sources of inspiration, though.  Instead, her list was of the people you might not remember to thank, the people who’d maybe done something small, but who’d nonetheless made a difference in your life.
I thought this was a great idea.  Herewith three of those people who changed my life in assorted ways:
1.  Nora Ephron and Meg Ryan.
Until the movie WHEN HARRY MET SALLY came out, I thought you had to choose from the stuff that was there on the menu.  I had no idea you could order food the way you wanted it.  But when Sally ordered her salad dressing on the side and  “the pie heated, and I don’t want the ice cream on top.  I want it on the side.  And I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it.  If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it’s real.  If it’s out of a can, then nothing,”  it was a revelation.  Ever since then I’ve ordered food exactly the way I wanted it–my Starbucks bacon-gouda sandwich-double cooked, my milk with ice in it, my pizza with chopped garlic.  And it’s been great.  The food’s been delicious!
2.  A seventh-grade teacher.
One of my junior-high teachers–I can’t remember her name or even what she taught except that she wasn’t my English teacher, who made us read JULIUS CAESAR, which I despised, and who told an obnoxious story about her idea of the perfect student, who when asked, “Who’s there?” would answer, “It is I”–stopped me after class one day and said, “You’re a really good student, but your handwriting is terrible.”
That was an understatement.  I had skipped third grade, which is when cursive is (or was) taught, and had been flung without any preparation into fourth grade.  I had learned to write it from that large alphabet that ran along the top of the blackboard (capital letter followed by lower-case), obviously not the best way to learn anything, let alone letters that had to be connected with one another.
“Your bad handwriting’s going to handicap you going forward,” this teacher said, and told me if I was willing to bring my lunch to her room, she’d teach me cursive.  I don’t remember anything else about the lessons–whether she taught me the Palmer Method out of a book or made up her own–or how long the lessons lasted (weeks? months?).  All I know is that I now have clear, easily readable, and even, when I’m not in a hurry, beautiful handwriting, and I owe it all to her.  I’m still stunned by her kindness, reaching out to a student to help and giving up her lunchtimes to do so.

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3.  My eighth-grade teacher, whose name I do remember.
Mrs. Werner was my home-room teacher, and every day after lunch she read aloud to us, one of which was Rumer Godden’s AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS.  This is NOT a children’s book, even though its heroine, Lovejoy, was ten years old.  She was also a thief.  She lived in post-war London, and when she decided she wanted to build a garden in the rubble of a bombed-out church, she not only shoplifted seeds and a trowel, but recruited other kids to steal for her.  She was also thoroughly unpleasant.  Not without reason.  She had a slutty mother with an assortment of nasty boyfriends and was often left with strangers for months at a time.  As I say, not a book for junior-high-schoolers.
I have no idea what anybody else in the class thought about the book, but I loved it AND Lovejoy.  It was my first introduction to Rumer Godden, who I fell in love with, especially her novel about grief, IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE.  It was also my first introduction  to how you can take a classic and update it (AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS is actually Frances Hodgson Burnett’s THE SECRET GARDEN retold.)
And it was my first introduction to the Blitz, planting a seed which blossomed when I went to St. Paul’s years later and fell in love with the fire watch and the history of London during the war–which had a HUGE impact on my life.
Thank you for reading EPISODE OF SPARROWS to me!  And thank you, Norah and Meg, for making my eating life so much more pleasant.  And THANK YOU, Seventh-Grade Teacher for giving up your lunchtimes to make my handwriting legible.  I’m sorry I don’t remember your name.  And I’m sorry I didn’t thank you before.
Thanks to everyone who’s helped me along the way–I couldn’t have done it without you!  And, to everybody reading this, have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Connie Willis

Website Update 10/12/17 — BLETCHLEY PARK AND ITS UNSUNG HEROES
I just saw an article about a reunion that Bletchley Park held on the seventy-eighth anniversary of Britain’s declaring war on Germany (after Hitler invaded Poland). More than a hundred veterans gathered at their old stomping grounds to commemorate the occasion and their contribution to the war effort.
(http://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/…)

The one hundred men and women had all worked at Bletchley Park as cryptanalysts, translators, mathematicians, file clerks, typists, Typex machine operators, Wrens, traffic analysts, wireless operators, and dispatch riders, indexing, cross-referencing, translating Morse code into letters, sending, receiving, and decoding messages.

The reunion event, which included a tour of the museum’s displays, media interviews, and photograph-taking, was a far cry from the one at the end of the war, when they burned documents and were re-sworn to secrecy about what they’d done at Bletchley Park and then went home to their families, unable to tell anyone about the critical part they’d played in the war. All they could say was that they’d had “a clerical job” or “worked in the War Office.”

What they’d really done was to win the war. Working in absolute secrecy, they’d intercepted, decoded, and translated Hitler’s (and the Italians’ and the Japanese’s) impossible-to-break Enigma codes and then used that information in dozens of decisive battles. They were responsible for the winning of the Battle of the North Atlantic and the success of D-Day, as well as many other battles, and if it weren’t for them, Rommel would have reached Cairo and the Allies would have lost the North Africa campaign.

But they couldn’t tell anybody, including families and spouses, that for over twenty-five years after the war, even though for some it meant being accused of shirking their military duties. They kept the secret nonetheless, during and after the war–so completely that husbands and wives were unaware the other worked at Bletchley Park, and so were roommates. Mary Every and Betty Webb both worked in Block F, Mary translating intercepted messages between enemy aircraft and Betty paraphrasing those same messages so that if they fell into enemy hands, the Nazis wouldn’t’ be able to figure out their Enigma codes had been broken, but they were unaware they were working within a few yards of each other.

Some of them carried their secret to the grave, and one woman nearly did–she initially refused to have emergency surgery because she was afraid she might blurt out something under the anesthetic.

In 1970, F. W. Winterbotham’s book about the work Bletchley Park did, THE ULTRA SECRET, was finally published, and people were finally able to talk about their experiences. In 1995, while doing research at the Imperial War Museum for my two-volume novel, BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR, which is partly set at Bletchley Park, I had the unique opportunity of interviewing a group of women who’d worked in World War II as ambulance drivers, fire watchers, and ARP wardens. One woman in the group said very little, and I thought she was probably just shy, but when I asked her what she’d done in the war, she smiled slyly and said, “Well…until a few years ago, I couldn’t tell you.” She had worked at Bletchley Park.

In 2009 the British government announced that Bletchley Park personnel would be recognized by a commemorative badge (which says, in typical understated fashion, “We also served”), and in 2012 Bletchley Park began holding reunions for the staff. At those reunions, Mary Every and Betty Webb found out they’d both worked in the same building and finally got to talk about their experiences in Block F, and many others made similar discoveries. For veterans like them, coming back to Bletchley Park has had a special meaning. As Doris Tuffin, aged 94, a former message transmitter, said, “It’s such a relief to come here because you had to keep the secret so long.”

This year’s event, which included a tour of the mansion, museum, and the new Codebreakers Wall, on which their names are listed, doubtless brought back memories of their time there. Bletchley Park still looks much the same as it did during the war.

I visited Bletchley Park last year–with considerable trepidation. I was terrified I’d find out I’d gotten some detail of my portrayal of it in BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR wrong. But it looked exactly like it had in photographs taken during the war. Originally a gingerbread-style Victorian estate with extensive grounds just outside the town of Bletchley, the house was transformed into offices, guards were posted at the brick-and-wrought-iron gates, and a score of wooden huts were erected on the grounds to serve the ever-expanding workforce.

The Victorian house looked exactly the same, and so did the pond, which the scientists and Wrens skated on in the winter and swans swam on in the summer, and the beautiful lawn, where people played tennis and sat listening to concerts. The gate through which thousands of workers poured every shift change was still there, and so was the gravel drive.

Some things have changed. The main hall of the mansion now holds a costume display from the movie THE IMITATION GAME, and Hut Four has been turned into a cafeteria for tourists (with much better food than in Bletchley Park’s wartime days of rationing). Block F is gone, demolished in 1987. There’s a visitors’ center and a museum, where you can see the bombes and Enigma machines and put a message into code yourself, and in the huts, you can see life-size holograms of cryptanalysts, Typex typists, and clerks working. But from the outside, when I was there, it looked just like it did in THE IMITATION GAME and ENIGMA, and, I hope, BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR.

What it didn’t look like, then or now, was a military intelligence operation. It looked more like a college campus, with its assortment of bookish, pipe-smoking professors and sloppily dressed nerds and pretty girls young enough to be coeds. And a whole array of eccentrics, from Turing, who wore a gas mask while riding his bicycle, to Dilly Knox, who would absentmindedly stick pieces of sandwich instead of tobacco into his pipe, and Alan Ross, who wore a blue knitted snood over his beard, and from physicists and statisticians to Egyptologists, chess players, classics scholars, Morse code experts, and crossword-puzzle whizzes.

They didn’t look much like a crack team of anything. When Winston Churchill saw them, he told Commander Denniston, “I told you to leave no stone unturned, but I had no idea you had taken me literally.” And it’s no wonder there was a local rumor that it was an insane asylum.

To add to it, the place didn’t look anything like a military facility, let alone the site of the most closely held secret of the war. I’ve always felt that one of the reasons Hitler never figured out the Allies had cracked the Enigma code was that if he’d had a place devoted to deciphering messages, it would have had high stone walls topped with barbed-wire, searchlights, dogs, and sentries armed with machine guns, not tennis and concerts. And it would have been staffed with military officers in impeccable uniforms, not pretty young debutantes wearing lipstick and professors in tweeds.
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And it would NEVER have occurred to him that those professors and debutantes would have kept the secret entrusted to them–and not just for the duration of the war, but for years and years afterward–not because they’d been bullied and threatened and terrorized into it, but because they loved their country and the values it stood for.

Bletchley Park is an amazing place, and I highly recommend visiting it. The exhibits are fascinating. But the true wonder of it is the people who worked there, from Turing, who designed the bombe that cracked Enigma and was the father of the modern computer, to Mavis Lever, who cracked the Italian naval Enigma code by realizing that the girlfriends of the Nazi coders could provide a clue to its decoding. From Tommy Flowers, who designed the Colossus computer and broke the Lorenz-encrypted messages between Hitler and his generals, to the thousands of WAAFs and Wrens and debs (many of them only eighteen) who intercepted messages, transcribed them, translated decoded messages into English, and typed, filed, cross-indexed, and saved the world.

I’m delighted they’re finally being honored and given their chance to tell their stories and reminisce about old times.

Shortly after I read the article about this year’s reunion, somebody posted the picture of the staff at the reunion with the caption, “We’ve called you here together today because the Nazis are back.”

It was funny–and yet not really. Especially after Charlottesville and the article I’d just read in the New York Times about the alt-right which quoted alt-right leader Jason Jorjani as bragging, “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great.” And when I read the comments sections of articles about the reunion, the number of pro-Nazi screeds was sickening.

“I thought we’d done away with the Nazis, finished, kaput,” Betty Webb said in an interview in the Independent. But if they come back, she’s ready for it. “I helped defeat the Nazis in 1941, and I’m ready to fight fascism in 2017.”

With her–and the rest of Bletchley Park’s heroes–behind us, I think we’ll be okay. Though they still don’t think of what they did as heroic. Arthur Maddocks, a mathematician who came up with cribs to break the coded messages, said, “It’s rather an exaggeration to be called heroes–the real heroes were the poor buggers doing the fighting.”

To which I say stuff and nonsense. They were–and are–the epitome of heroes!

Connie Willis
_____________________________________________________________

NOTE: If you’re interested in learning more about Bletchley Park and the work they did in World War II, I recommend:

THE ULTRA SECRET by F.W. Winterbotham
ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA by Andrew Hodges
STATION X: THE CODEBREAKERS OF BLETCHLEY PARK by Michael Smith
THE SECRET LIFE OF BLETCHLEY PARK by Sinclair McKay

CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson
BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis

THE IMITATION GAME
ENIGMA
CODEBREAKER
THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE, Seasons 1 and 2.

WEBSITE UPDATE–KIT REED

I was so sorry to hear last week that Kit Reed had died.  she was one of my favorite authors–and had been since I was thirteen and first read her brilliant short story, “The Wait.”  It was the most frightening story I had ever read.  It left a lasting impression on me, and from that moment on, I was on the lookout for Kit Reed stories. When I found them–stories like “The Judas Bomb,” “Mr. Da V”, and “On Behalf of the Product–they were just as good as “The Wait” and, in their own way, just as frightening.  The fear came not from slasher gore or creepy atmospherics, but from the feeling that she was telling you the truth about the world–and that truth was what you’d been afraid it was.

Kit didn’t use the usual trappings of horror.  She used harmless things like housewives and day care centers and visiting moms, small towns and celebrities and magazine ads to terrify you.  And make you think, really THINK about things you thought you understood.

Like in her novella, “Songs of War,” about an actual war between the sexes, in which the women of the town take to a military encampment up on the hill and prepare to do battle.  It was written at a time when there were lots of women’s rights stories being done, and “Songs of War” has been called a feminist story.  But that doesn’t really cover it.  She was also writing about mixed allegiances (one of the women keeps sneaking back into town to fix dinner for her husband) and misplaced loyalties and  how volunteers (no matter in what conflict for what cause) always think the war’s going to be noble and exciting and easy–till it turns into something else altogether.

Kind of like Kit’s stories.  When you’re reading “The Food Farm” or “Pilots of the Purple Twilight” or “Automatic Tiger,” you think at first it’s about the cult of celebrity or the plight of military wives or the dangers of wish fulfillment.  But Kit always has bigger fish to fry, and, as you read, you realize the story’s also about culpability or grief or losing your soul.  Or something even deeper than that.

Short stories aren’t the only thing Kit did.  She also wrote sardonic, provocative novels like FORT PRIVILEGE and MOTHER’S NOT DEAD, SHE’S ONLY SLEEPING and suspense novels like TWICE BURNED and GONE under the name of Kit Craig, and she was a journalist, winning the New England Newspaperwoman of the Year Award twice as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she taught writing workshops at Wesleyan University.

But her true genius lay in her short stories, which ranged from funny to horrifying to infinitely sad.  My absolute favorite (except for “The Wait” which is in a class by itself) is “Great Escape Tours, Inc.”  It’s about a group of senior citizens who go on a field trip to the past where they’re promised they’ll be young again.  And they are.  But this is not COCOON, and the tour promoters neglected to say how young they would be or what would happen if they missed the bus back.  Only Kit Reed could have written that story–or thought of it.

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Most people never get to meet their heroes.  I was lucky.  In 1998, I was asked to write a foreword for a collection of Kit’s stories called WEIRD WOMEN, WIRED WOMEN.  It was one of the great honors of my life.  And a couple of years later, Sheila Williams, my editor at ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, called to tell me Kit wanted to have lunch with me when I was in New York.  “Oh, frabjous day, callou callay!” as Lewis Carroll would say.

“You have to promise me you won’t act like a crazed fan,” Sheila said.  “She thinks of you as a colleague, not a fan.”  Which was ridiculous–she was my hero!–and I wasn’t sure I could keep from gushing all over her, but I promised to keep the fawning to a minimum.
Kit took us to lunch at her elegant club, and I was concentrating so hard on behaving that I don’t remember anything about it except the heavenly macaroons we had for dessert (long before the whole French macaron craze swept New York.)  Nor do I remember anything we talked about except for her saying they were about to lose the macaroons because the chef who made them was leaving, and she didn’t know what she was going to do without them.

But I remember the conversation was delightful and that Kit was exactly as witty and smart and kind as I had thought she would be.

Later on I got to see her at several conventions and discovered she was as big a fan of the BBC series PRIMEVAL  as I was.  We had a number of great conversations about how well-written and cleverly plotted it was, and we also talked about politics and children and everything else.

I wish we’d had the chance to have more conversations and that I’d gotten to know her better.  And been able to communicate (without sounding like a gibbering fan girl) how wonderful I thought she was and how much her stories had inspired me.  To say I’ll miss her and her unique voice as a writer is the understatement of the century.  I don’t know what we’re all going to do without her.

Connie Willis