Angela’s Dust and Ashes

Technorati Tags: Frank McCourt,Steven Spielberg,Alice Walker,The Color Purple,Alan Parker,Angela's Ashes

The British mid-summer weather continues to be a story of leaden skies and steel-grey rain pellets.

• Our little semi’s been on the market since last September – and last night we cosied up, first with the gas heater and then  the electric bed blanket. Heavens, it’s early yet – only July 19 – 20!
• Business is so quiet that I need a super-amplified  megaphone to hear it.
• I’ve been driven potty by a blog advertising company about a $2.00 – yes, you read that correctly – assignment.
• Yesterday, I lost my house-keys during what should have been a pleasant and uneventful afternoon out and found I’d been left ‘in the cold’ by those whom I thought were at least friendly acquaintances.
• This weekend I also narrowly avoided  being defrauded in an internet scam.

Then what?

Today the world learned that another fine writer had returned to his maker. It’s strange that on Saturday I had noticed a fine first edition of Angela’s Ashes in a friend’s new bookshop. Was that my native intuition in overdrive again?

What, I wonder, makes a creative genius tick? Was the Irish-American, Frank McCourt fuelled solely by liquor? Despite a proverbial ‘good innings’, would he have lasted another 20 years if he had not been inundated by the demon drink?

Unusually, I read McCourt’s memoir sometime after seeing Alan Parker’s  beautiful and searingly  dismal  take on the original. But before having my feelings confirmed by the wonderful book, it was self-evident that his film, like Steven Spielberg’s version of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple illustrated to  the widest possible audience not only the desperation of grinding poverty but how women were always but always at the bottom of the heap.

If we are all “dust and ashes” then the biggest pile has ever been on the distaff side.

 

 

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