Out of Nashville

One of the upsides to a kidney stone (hahaha) is that you can lay on the couch all drugged up and watch movies you've always meant to see but never got around to. And if they suck you're too stoned to care.

Today, twenty years after the rest of the free world, I finally watched Out Of Africa. I had avoided it because I generally dislike those overlong movies that look like slowmoving calendars you'd get from an insurance company (see under Wolves, Dances With). "Yes, Jerrold, it's boring as dried paint, but isn't Slovania a luuurvly setting?"

This I finally watched because it's about the writer Isak Dineson and I have a bit of a thing for writers. I am one, and we are a funny breed. We don't come out much, so when we see one of our own there's a lot of pheremon-sniffing. I'm especially curious about these Great Writers of Yore who Had Lives. Much of the talk these days is about the lack of real life experience in society and how that has deprived us of Real Writers.

Halfway into the film I was downright morose. How will I ever be a writer without syphillis? Without a bad marriage and an African coffee farm? I've never led a cattle drive across 300 miles of Africa to feed my bastard husband and the other British troops, only to contract the rot of Pangloss and a ratty compass. It was depressing as hell.

You know what, though? Karen Blixen may have loved an elephant killer, but I've loved a man who builds machines for fun and makes my heart dance. I've been able to find happiness without desert mud and I once gave Garth Brooks a dollar for the Coke machine. Not too shabby, and Camille Paglia doesn't have to read my happy little books.