High Stake Election Strategy

 

How can a film about a fraught super-high stakes election help get you through the fraught supe-high stakes American election? My theory about uncertain, crucial outcomes is better to wait till the verdict is final and definite. If it’s good news, you’ll be relieved and overjoyed. If it’s bad news, at least you would have had a few extra hours, or days, to indulge in optimism. A case in point: a couple of years ago when I awaited a medical report that had the potential to be, at a minimum, life-changing, I didn’t look at it over the weekend. If it turned out to be good, great, and if on Monday it confirmed the worst, well, at least I had the weekend before the sky fell in.

On the night of November 8th, 2016, I went to bed certain, as everyone I knew seemed to be, that the morning would confirm Hilary Clinton as our next President. A disturbing dream woke me up in the middle of the night. My mother had died a few weeks earlier but in the dream I was hurrying to her sickbed, where I found her sitting up in bed and reassuring me: “It was just a cold.” I puzzled over the dream for a moment and then thought, since I was awake, I might as well turn on my cell phone and take a look at the election results. To my shock, Trump was winning. Now I wish I’d slept through till morning.

So this November 5th election night, I opted to go watch a film about another election where the global stakes are arguably at least as high: the election of a Pope in Rome. “Conclave” is a riveting story of intrigue and ambition, of Cardinal rivalries and cardinal sins, overlaid with gorgeous pomp and pageantry. Well worth the distraction from the news roller-coaster of doom-watching or irrational exuberance. Especially since this election promises to be a marathon, not a sprint, with final results taking days to certify, and then bracing for challenges and potential unrest. Be grateful for the calm before the storm.

 

The Paris Olympics Hot Air Balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 The Paris Olympics hot air balloon, Napoleon in Egypt, and the hero of The Naqib’s Daughter

 

Watching the hot air balloon that dominated the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, I immediately thought of the original Montgolfieres and their sensational use in Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated Egyptian campaign in 1798. Nicolas Conte, the hero of my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter, was the Chief Engineer of the Balloonist Corps in Napoleon’s army in Egypt.

Napoleon tasked Nicolas Conte with flying a manned hot air balloon over French-occupied Cairo, as a display of superior French military engineering intended to awe the local population. Conte’s objected that he could not answer for the safety of such a demonstration with inadequate resources and limited time, and prevailed on Bonaparte to at least let him attempt an unmanned Montgolfiere. The Cairene crowds gathered to witness this miracle of French invention, a formidable flying airship capable of transporting soldiers great distances. The enormous hot air balloon rose in the cloudless sky until it burst into flame and came down ignominiously in flaming tatters. Far from being impressed, the crowd dispersed in disgust, convinced, according to the scathing Egyptian historian El Jabarti, that “this was no more than a very large kite of the sort knaves at street fairs fly to entertain children.”

 

Françoise Hardy and the Yé Yé Era

 Françoise Hardy and I 

Nothing has the power to bounce you back to your teenage years like the music of that decade, and nothing sobers you up like learning of the passing of one of your adolescent icons. If you grew up in the 1960’s listening to the French pop singers of the decade, as I did, you had your favorite, just as you had your favorite Beatle. Sylvie Vartan, Chantal Goya, France Gall, Sheila, and Françoise Hardy, were everywhere, especially on the cover of Salut les Copains.

Although they were not a girl group, they were invariably swept together in press and publicity, emblematic of a fresh, upbeat yé yé generation, light years away from the moody chanteuses like Juliette Greco and Mireille Mathieu.    

Each cultivated her own style. Sylvie Vartan, the cute bleached blonde in glamorous outfits, Johnny Halliday’s girlfriend. France Gall and Chantal Goya with their identical page boy bangs, one blonde, one dark, like negative images of each other. Sheila, with whom I empathized, because she seemed more awkward than the others, as if, secretly, she sometimes had to struggle with her hair or her weight.

Françoise Hardy, on the other hand, was the epitome of cool. She stood out from the others with her tall, lean, slightly androgynous figure and style, akin to her contemporary Jane Birkin. One suspected there were darker depths to Francoise Hardy. You could say she was the George Harrison of the group. She is also the one whose classic style and thoughtful lyrics have survived the test of time. How fitting today to listen to her “Mon Amie la Rose,” with its intimations of mortality, inviting the listener to contemplate the short, lovely life of the rose. The beauty of the garden today, withered and denuded the next. “On est bien peu de chose….” Or, as Shakespeare put it: “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So true. RIP Françoise Hardy.

The Beauty and Menace of Spring in Carolina

 Today the roses are in glorious full bloom for the first time this Spring. But so is the kudzu, its malignant vines obliterating entire banks of trees seemingly overnight, as if a sorcerer had turned them into humpbacked monsters that would not be free of his spell till Fall. Beauty and menace, cultivation and wilderness, it is with Nature as with Life. Today on the trials the brand new crop of babies were jogged along in their prams by the yummy mummies, and elderly couples aimed their binoculars at the trees and turned to smile at each other as if to say, we made it, we’re here for one more Spring.