2007 Finds

You'll get no 'best of' nor 'top ten' lists from me; that's way too much pressure. In the few posts I've been able to manage I've already pointed out a few favorite things from this year.  So here's a couple of things I left out that I ran across this year.

Poet Franz Wright

I don't recall now how I ran across this name but I ended up getting Walking to Martha's Vineyard (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and was blown away.  I haven't read alot of poetry since college, though I do enjoy dipping back into a few of the modernists now and then. But you don't need a class to understand Wright; this is sparse, strong, direct and raw language and his topics range through addiction, abandonment, faith, spiritual yearning, gratitude. Upon finishing Walking I immediately ordered and read God's Silence and The Beforelife, both excellent.  (Then, in haste, I ordered both Earlier Poems and Ill Lit before realizing that each is a collection of Wright's earlier work and that the books overlap quit a bit - though Ill Lit has some translations by Wright that are amazing and which aren't in Earlier Poems).  I'm enjoying Wright tremendously and find myself returning to certain poems again and again; these pieces will be, I sense, lifelong companions.  I recommend starting with Walking to Martha's Vineyard. 

Finally, some good overviews of developmental psychology.  

Being a dad has sparked my interest in child and developmental psychology and for a long time I searched and asked around for a readable overview, to no avail; everything was either too "boiled down" or too specialized.  But this past year I've found a few good resources that have been very helpful in trying to understand my own children and what they're going through as they grow up: 

David Elkind, The Hurried Child, chapter six "Growing Up Slowly." This is the best short overview of child development I've found. 

Chap Clark, Hurt and Disconnected: Parenting Teens in a Myspace World, both of which focus on adolescent development; very helpful description of early, mid-, and late adolescence. 

Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society and Identity and the Life Cycle.  From what I can gather Erikson is sort of the father of developmental psychology and his eight stages were enormously influential on succeeding generations of theorists. 

This American Life podcast. 

I've known I would like this if I ever got into it and the free podcast has been the perfect opportunity to do just that; I still can't believe these things are free.  It seems that about every third or fourth show simply kills me.  A few favorites so far: #317 Unconditional Love, #69 Dreamhouse, #188 Kid Logic, and #322 Shouting Across the Divide. 

No Country for Old Men

It's rare for things to come together as beautifully as they do in this film. 

Subjectively speaking, you have the pairing of two of my favorite artists: Cormac McCarthy and Joel and Ethan Coen - one of the greatest living writers paired with the Coens, one of the greatest film-making teams around. This is a match made in heaven; I'm not sure I've ever seen an interpretation of a novel as fitting and wise as this one. The Coens faithfully translate McCarthy to the screen: his land-scapes, narrative pace, the rural characters and their speech.  They avoid trying to do the impossible, which is to completely reproduce the longer speeches of the Sheriff in the book.  The casting is perfect in the cases of Moss and Sheriff Bell; but Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh is a visual incarnation of the kind of mythic evil that shows up so often in McCarthy's fiction. 

The ending is stunning; again, captures McCarthy about perfectly. 

Go see it. 

(Warning: it is violent).