CANNERY ROW

I've had some more unusual dreams. The other day I dreamt I was back in our Sackville house and it was summer but there was snow on the ground! (The temperature was expected to rise to thirty degrees.) I also dreamed about going to a film festival documentary from Nicaragua--or was it a TV episode from Germany?--except that when we got to the cinema they put us on a bus to the screening!  And I dreamed of trying to remember all the movies George Roy Hill directed, and being unsure whether the Chevy Chase comedy The Funny Farm was one. (Awake, I confirmed that it was.)

I also dreamed of finding my father lying on a hillside fast asleep.  And of reading a big children's book with the chapters in reverse order, including the story of a superhero who morphed into a little quail who was about to be attacked in the street by hundreds of armored rats, but when they walked off the curb they fell into an acidic puddle that disintegrated them!

Ever read a book or see a movie where it lost you at one key moment? Screenwriter William Goldman, in Adventures in the Screen Trade, remembers a preview for his The Great Waldo Pepper and this scene where Susan Sarandon was supposed to perform this wing-walking stunt but froze in the middle of it, and barnstormer Robert Redford tried to save her, but she fell to her death. The audience had liked the earlier scenes, but right at that moment the movie lost them. (That was one of the movies George Roy Hill directed.) Similarly, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander lost me in the scene where the kids were in two places at once.

I was thinking of this because of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  The first half was pretty fun, but then there was this chapter where the local low-lifes had been gathering hundreds of frogs for Doc the marine biologist to sell, and he was out of town then so they decided that when he came back they'd throw him a surprise party at his place, which they'd sneaked into.  But he was late getting back and they started the party without him, and things got so out of hand that by the time he returned they'd trashed the place! (And the frogs escaped, of course.)

The book kind of lost me at that point.  Things have to go wrong, of course, otherwise there'd be no point!  That sort of plot I find depressing.  It reminded me of George Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which I haven't read, but I saw the movie with Richard E. Grant as a full-of- himself advertising copywriter who decides to go through a poverty stage so he can become an Artist.  After a while he actually sells something and comes into some money, but it just results in him going on a tear, getting arrested and screwing up royally.  Because if he didn't screw up there'd be no point.