JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Every month the SyCip law firm invites a guest to give a talk on their field of interest. Next Friday I am the featured speaker and I have decided to discuss lawyers in literature, leaving out John Grisham.

I’m glad I don’t have to talk about how I write because it is a deeply boring subject to anyone who is not me. There is nothing more aggravating than speaking to people who would obviously prefer to be somewhere else, and then soliciting questions and getting dead silence. Occasionally there are tears—why do people assume we will become close friends on sight and braid each other’s hair? What have I written to give that impression? I assume lawyers are a tougher bunch.

So I’m reviewing my topic. There are a lot of TV shows and movies about lawyers and comparatively few novels. There’s the Perry Mason series and John Mortimer’s Rumpole, but I’m not doing series so that also leaves out Nancy Drew’s father Carson Drew. Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel—there’s an erudite lawyer. Lots of lawyers claim to have been inspired by Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird—more likely Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the movie. There’s Portia/Balthazar in The Merchant of Venice, who keeps Shylock from collecting a pound of flesh from Antonio because their contract doesn’t mention blood being shed (As my mother would say, “Pilosopo”).

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel about an inheritance squabble that spans generations, is crawling with lawyers, and a friend swears by Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I’m sure I’ve forgotten an essential character, so please remind me. There must be a ton of lawyers in Balzac. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the lawyer Shepherd plans to trap his client Sir Walter Elliot into marrying his daughter, the widow Mrs. Clay.

Another title jumped out of the Camus biography I’m reading: Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall. I’d never read The Fall so I started on it today. Albert Camus died in a car crash on January 4, 1960; I’m belatedly declaring this my Camus month.

Where is my head? Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence! Mental note: Look up Henry James. Where there are property issues, there are lawyers.

Jan Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Marriage

Quotes from the most-emailed NYT article of the day: More Men Marrying Wealthier Women.

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women.”

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being. Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

“But, I think for me, it comes down to compatibility. Can you grow with me? Or as my genius friend the textile designer says, she asks on first dates or meeting men in bars, ‘Do you have a passport and a library card?’ ”

“ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

The story of Orpheus the musician who could charm the birds from the trees and tame wild beasts with his songs, who went down to the underworld to try to retrieve his lover Eurydice from Death, has been turning up in literature, music, and art for millennia (more recently in cinema). Everyone’s taken a crack at the story since Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD) wrote it up in his Metamorphoses.

Jean Cocteau’s dreamy Orphée is set in 1940s Paris, with Jean Marais as the famous poet Orphée and Maria Casares as the Princess of Death. Marais is handsome but kind of bland; Casares is fabulous. (I’m reading Camus, A Romance—she was Albert’s longtime lover.)

In a famous scene Orphée passes through a mirror to the otherworld.

Marcel Camus’s exuberant musical Orfeu Negro is set in the favelas of 1950s Rio de Janeiro. His Orpheus does bossa nova. Carnival! It was the first time the outside world heard bossa nova, and they went mad.

The Italian writer Dino Buzzati’s take on Orpheus is a trippy graphic novel called Poem Strip (including An Explanation of the Afterlife). It happens in Milan in the 60s, and can’t help being referred to as “Felliniesque”. Orpheus is a famous pop singer named Orfi, and he’s in love with a girl called Eura. The entrance to the underworld is on via Saterna, a street that doesn’t appear in maps of the city. When Eura vanishes through the door of a mysterious mansion, Orfi follows her to the dimension of the dead and tries to win over the spirits with his music.

The enduring appeal of the Orpheus story: We like to think that Art can conquer Death. And we still don’t get what we want.

Michael has already begun his annual novena for Meryl Streep’s long-overdue third Oscar, and upon his urging I watched It’s Complicated. Directed by Nancy Meyers, It’s Complicated is a romantic comedy about a successful entrepreneur (La Streep) who find herself living the ultimate revenge fantasy: her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin), who had abandoned her for a much younger woman ten years earlier, comes back to her, and she gets to be the other woman. Not only that but her very nice architect (Steve Martin) is interested in her. It’s a lot like Meyers’s previous movie Something’s Gotta Give, in which a successful playwright (Diane Keaton) has to choose between a younger man (Keanu Reeves) and one closer to her own age (Jack Nicholson). Both movies involve a beautiful house, so you might say that Meyers specializes in the late middle-age architectural romcom.

It’s Complicated is not that complicated: it’s average, but at least it’s not embarrassing—the heroine does not mug adorably or behave like an adolescent, and there are no convenient plot twists (though it has the obligatory woman-confiding-giddily-to-her-shrieking-girlfriends scene, which is pure television). What lifts this movie above average-ness is the acting. Having the words “Meryl Streep” and “brilliant” in the same sentence seems redundant: here she is entirely credible as a smart, sensible woman who lands in a situation she has dreamed of and greatly enjoys, but insists on keeping her wits about her. She imbues her character with a range of human feeling from giddiness to regret, insecurity to quiet strength, ending in self-knowledge. Meryl Streep can take a line drawing and make her 3D.

Steve Martin is always interesting playing a “normal”, regular person; no matter how normal and regular he looks, you know there is something off-kilter about him. We still think he was robbed of the Best Actor Oscar for All Of Me, in which he played a lawyer possessed by the spirit of Lily Tomlin; in the hysterical courtroom sequence you see Steve Martin playing Steve Martin possessed by Lily Tomlin playing Steve Martin.

Alec Baldwin is having a renaissance thanks to 30 Rock, and I want to know: Why is Alec Baldwin so hot? He’s old, he’s fat—he looks like he ate the Alec Baldwin circa Knots Landing—and he’s scorching. This has been going on for a while—when we saw The Departed, Raymond pronounced Baldwin a sexy tub of lard, and I figured it was because Raymond is a freak, but after seeing 30 Rock and this movie I have to agree. Cookie says it’s because he’s funny and angry, which is a lethal combination. Many reviewers have pointed out how comfortable Baldwin is in his own skin, proudly patting the belly that precedes him into a room; he doesn’t care how he looks, and that’s attractive. My theory is that Alec Baldwin has always had an outsize personality, and when he was thin it came across as a menacing arrogance, but now that he’s chunky it fits. What do you think?

Messy Bessy eco-friendly household products at the Rustan’s Flower Shop. They’ve got linen sprays, anti-mold and mildew sprays, insect repellent, all-purpose cleaning scrubs, hand wash and whatnot.

I needed a (cheap) birthday gift for a neat-freak friend. This gift set consists of laundry linen spray and an all-surface cleaner.

Abe Lincoln shorts my brother-in-law found at Landmark. I thought I’d seen some strange designs on shorts, but these are just bizarre. There’s something disturbing about wearing Honest Abe’s face on your posterior.

I found Secret Ingredients, the New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, at National Bookstore in Glorietta 5, P705. The anthology contains comic pieces by Woody Allen and Steve Martin, longer fiction by Roald Dahl and Julian, Barnes, a report on the Cheese Wars by Burkhard Bilger (The US FDA requires that all store-bought milk be pasteurized; unaged raw-milk cheese is “considered a birthright” in France and Italy), a profile of the wild food advocate Euell Gibbons, a buffet of articles on food. It reminds us that food writing begins with good writing.

I recommend the New Yorker anthologies over the complete New Yorker archive on DVD, which is user-unfriendly, paranoid about being copied, and hard on the eyes. It’s like doing research on one of those microfiche readers. Basically they just scanned every single issue of the New Yorker; good luck finding the article you want.

Army Navy burger at Glorietta 5. Where did I hear that this is Judy Ann Santos’s personal recipe? If it is, Juday can really cook. The burgers are juicy, with a hint of spice, and they’re served in foil wrappers that remind me of my childhood when some people said “ham-boor-jer”. Delicious. The burgers cost P135 to 235, and they also have burritos.