6A — Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
My 2019 New Year’s resolution was to only
purchase books written by women. Given the
beyond-scary statistics of male authors being
published around eight and a half times more
frequently than their female counterparts, I
recognized the only way to beat the statistic
is to support female authors and share their
books. Ironically, I’d read Peg Alford Pursell’s
debut collection “Show Her A Flower, A Bird,
A Shadow” in 2017, prior to realizing she was
joining us at Literati to celebrate her newest
collection of fables and stories, titled “A Girl
Goes into The Forest.”
Pursell is known for her lyrical prose and
imaginative world building. Although she’s an
advanced, published writer, she did not think of
becoming a writer as a young person.
“I grew up in a small town in the Allegheny
Mountains where there was no bookstore, not
even in the two closest cities, and I’d never met
a writer and was unaware of anyone who wrote
— practical occupations were encouraged. Yet, I
always wrote,” Pursell said in an interview with
The Daily. Pursell’s prose writing is extremely
visceral and poetic — it builds worlds around
you as you read. As a young person, she won
awards for her poetry, and in her adult writing
career, she’s honed her poetic expertise in her
prose.
Despite her recent success, Pursell wasn’t
always confident in herself as a writer. Even
after her MFA graduation from the Warren
Wilson College program for writers, she claims
she suffered a “crisis of confidence.” Her first
book was featured by Poets & Writers magazine
and was also named the INDIES “Book of the
Year for Literary Fiction.” Though she had a
few slow moments in her early career, she has
since thrived in the literary world. Her most
recent collection was published in July of 2019,
and she just finished putting the final touches
on the manuscript for a novel. Despite the non-
traditional trajectory of her career and not-
straightforward, she hit a stride within the vein
of story collections and magical, mysterious
world building.
She specifically hones this craft in “A Girl
Goes into the Forest,” which features 78
imaginative stories broken down into nine
sections. The sections each introduce a line
from “The Snow Queen,” a fairy tale by Hans
Christian Andersen, a favorite of hers.
“His fairy tale is significant to me because it’s
one of the few in which the girl has agency —
Gerta rescues the boy, little Kaye, whose been
corrupted and who everyone else has given up
on. The stories in “A Girl Goes” were written
over a number of years and collected for their
shared thematic investigations into the mythos
of the American girl, nature of consciousness
and human connections to wildernesses without
and within,” Pursell said. The book grapples
with the complexity of female agency and
feminine protagonists.
“It’s essential that female and female-
identifying writers tell our stories and share
our perspectives, for though most readers are
female, the largest number of authors continue
to be male. This continues to make no sense,
though it does reflect the reality of patriarchal
capitalism, a system that hurts everyone,
regardless of gender,” Pursell said. As a woman
writing female characters into mainstream
published literature, Pursell is aware of her
place as a female writer and uses her status to
tell stories about this narrative and experience.
“The book endeavors to offer readers new ways
for seeing the familiar American metaphoric
landscape, in ways that I hope speak to each
reader, in their own unique way,” Pursell said.
It is not an easy feat to accomplish — rewriting
and rediscovering the American landscape in a
metaphoric and inventive way. However, Purcell
takes on and executes this feat with a descriptive
prose voice and stunning imagery.
As a young woman aspiring to go into a similar
field as Pursell and hoping to meet similar
success, I asked her what her advice would be to
her 20-year-old self regarding her career path.
Her advice was poignant, and something I will
personally remember as I begin to understand
my desire to be a writer.
“The most important thing I’d want any young
self to know is there’s no one pathway, especially
when it comes to writing and publication
readership. It’s a twisting and turning route,
with surprises and luck and disappointments
to navigate. That it’s important to protect the
writing self, especially from the publishing
author self (two very different selves, oftentimes
at odds), and to cultivate that solitude from
which one writes and creates,” Pursell said.
Peg Alford Pursell chats
about her process & prose
ELI RALLO
Daily Arts Writer
COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW
As a woman writing
female characters
into mainstream
published literature,
Pursell is aware of
her place as a female
writer and uses her
status to tell stories
about this narrative
and experience
The lawyers of “Bluff City Law” want to change
the world. Unfortunately, their show writers are
not as keen on making this courtroom drama pilot
any different from its peers.
NBC’s new fall procedural “Bluff City Law”
follows former corporate shark Sydney Strait
(Caitlin McGee, “Grey’s Anatomy”) as she moves
back to her hometown of Memphis following
the untimely death of her mother. With much
reluctance, she accepts her father’s invitation to
rejoin his law firm — a cozy office full of smiling and
polite Southern stock characters — and handle civil
cases instead of continuing to work on “the dark
side” of large corporations.
Sydney’s father, Elijah Strait (Jimmy Smits,
“NYPD Blue”), in between moments of mourning
his wife and accepting praise for being a legendary
civil-suit lawyer, seeks to win back his daughter’s
affections after a lifetime of cheating on her mother.
Upon Sydney’s return to her father’s firm, she
happily greets her supporting characters and learns
of her next case: A high school custodian, Edgar
Soriano, and his family claim his terminal cancer
is the direct result of exposure to popular fertilizer
produced by a conveniently evil conglomerate,
Americorp.
Through some calculated grandstanding and
some dramatic violations of courtroom and social
etiquette, the Straits win the case, secure over
$45 million in damages for the Soriano family and
establish precedence for a pending class action suit
against Americorp. Sydney and her father start to
get along better, one of the firm’s partners has begun
an appeal for a wrongfully convicted prisoner and
some romantic tension is brewing between Sydney
and her ex-husband, the chief of detectives.
On paper, “Bluff City Law” has all the components
of a good courtroom drama. It has snappy dialogue,
a fresh case every week, some moral introspection
about good and evil in the American justice system.
But in practice, the show falls flat. It’s major issue
is its focus. The sympathetic clients exist only
to be defended and pitied. The lawyers drive the
emotion of the show and are the only ones shown
suffering from corporate greed. Suffering by being
in proximity to actual victims, of course.
The storylines of horrific injustice simply serve
as a backdrop to play up the rather uninteresting
personal issues of the Straits and their partners at
the firm. The warped focus results in a shocking
lack of heart or emotional stakes for the audience.
Rather than demonstrating the hard work involved
in these cases ripped from the headlines, characters
just talk about their already sterling reputations and
inexplicable talents ad nauseum. Any emotional
conflict is expressed by how tragic it would be for
the lawyers to fail by co-opting the actual hardship
of their clients.
Yes, the system is broken. Yes, victims of the
system deserve justice. But focusing on beautiful
attorneys winning sanitized, simplistic cases gives
the wrong people attention they don’t necessarily
deserve. For every Erin Brockovich securing a
guilty verdict and getting a movie made about
her, there are hundreds of people and towns that
continue to suffer without media coverage or a
team of Sydney Straits to break the rules and save
the day.
The lawyers of “Bluff City Law” are good
people. Great people, if you ask them. In fact, every
scene of the show’s pilot episode revolves around
the moral superiority of its main characters and
how wonderful they are for being humanitarian
lawyers. Yet, despite their lofty rhetoric and good
intentions, the show’s premiere relies on tired
courtroom drama tropes and petty personal feuds
while failing to come through on its promise to
“change the world.”
‘Bluff City Law’ gets off to
a very disappointing start
ANYA SOLLER
For the Daily
TV REVIEW
NBC
Humans are entitled creatures. Our superiority complexes
prevent us from acknowledging our relationship with the natural
world to be one of mutualism, not parasitism. Though a cynical
thought, it seems ingrained in our psyche to take as much as
possible with minimal reciprocation. A prime example of this
greed is found in our treatment of bees, one of the most central
species to sustaining our environment.
Bees embody balance, buzzing behind the scenes to maintain
the agricultural life-cycle through pollination. Despite their
centrality to the flow of our daily lives, society rarely witnesses
the magic of bees, and thus fails to respect it. The sole female
beehunter in Europe, Hatidze Muratova’s world revolves around
bees, a dynamic that is jeopardized when a new family disturbs
the peace in Honeyland, seeking to learn the craft of beekeeping
under the incentive of pure profit. Though the plot revolves
around beekeeping, at the core of the film, “Honeyland” is a much
deeper message about greed, solitude and human connection, a
message that pushes us all to reflect on our interactions with the
world around us and the ways we treat one another.
A concept the film reiterates again and again is harmony. Before
the arrival of the Sam family, Hatidze’s circle was relatively small,
consisting of her sick mother, a few animal companions and, of
course, her bees. Whenever she makes the long journey up to
the beehive, it is so clear from the way that she gently lifts away
the rockface and coaxes the bees off of the honeycomb, that her
attitude toward the insects is one of honor and understanding.
Among the swarms of bees, Hatidze appears at peace, unbothered
by buzzing and fearless of stings.
With the arrival of the Sams, the atmosphere of peace and
symmetry is instantaneously interrupted. The family is loud,
unruly and eager to learn the ways of beekeeping, which Hatidze
willingly teaches them. Though she enjoys the companionship that
the Sam family brings, her tone soon changes when she realizes
that the patriarch, Hussein Sam, has no intention of cultivating
a give-and-take relationship with the bees. The evolution of the
relationship between Hatidze and the family from neighborly to
hostile is exemplified through the change in behavior of the bees.
Under Hatidze’s care, the bees are calm and behaved, whereas
under Hussein, they are feisty, stinging Hussein and his children
left and right. This juxtaposition hints at the film’s larger theme
of the bonds people form with their environments. While Hatidze
regards the bees as companions and business partners for selling
honey, Hussein only perceives them as temporary resources,
meant to be used and then discarded.
Through the differing attitudes of these two characters,
directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov prompt
audiences to consider their own ties to the world around them. Do
we treat the planet with respect, with an approach of reciprocation,
or do we simply view the world as an asset, destined to be used up?
‘Honeyland’ shows a give-and-take
SAMANTHA NELSON
Daily Arts Writer
FILM REVIEW
Honeyland
The State Theatre
Contact Films
Bluff City Law
Pilot
NBC
Mondays @ 10 p.m.
By Jeffrey Wechsler
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/02/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
10/02/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, October 2, 2019
ACROSS
1 Barely enough
6 Like a pooch’s
smooch
9 “Happy Days”
actress Erin
14 Software writer
15 Texter’s “As I
see it”
16 Defunct defense
gp.
17 Pear variety
18 Opening setting
of “Madagascar”
19 Be carried by the
current
20 Fort Worth sch.
21 RR stop
23 Giuseppe’s god
25 “S” on an
invitation
26 NFL’s Gronk and
others
27 Roller coaster
experiences
29 Previously, to a
poet
30 1999 Ron
Howard satire
32 Easy-to-spot
jigsaw pieces
33 Ado
34 Turn back to zero
36 Hundred Acre
Wood joey
37 Egyptian
Christians
38 Word from
Robin preceding
headache,
homework, and
hamstrings,
among others
40 “Beetle Bailey”
dog
42 __ monster
43 Song and dance
45 Ramp, and
what’s found
in each set of
circles
50 Con
51 Floor models
52 Putting game
54 Iconic lemon
56 “Live With Kelly
and Ryan”
network
57 Big name in
whisky
58 Small songbird
59 Reevaluated
favorably
62 Corp. tech boss
63 Action film gun
64 Privately
65 Journalist Curry
66 Brief time
67 Taste
68 Charles of R&B
69 Macaw, for some
DOWN
1 Disperse
2 Admit having lost
3 Fiddles with
4 Fresh start?
5 Estate manager’s
suggestion
6 Potter’s specialty
7 Angsty rock
genre
8 “Ta-ta!”
9 Early PC
platform
10 Above, to a bard
11 Elevate
12 Initially
13 Qualifier for a
minimum price
22 With 48-Down,
Time Lord played
by various
performers
24 They, in Calais
28 “Need __ on?”
31 Jam ingredient?
33 Cinematographer’s
compilation
35 Temporary
usage fee
37 PC key
39 __-back: relaxed
41 Solemn bugle
solo
42 Early Christian
44 Kilimanjaro
topper
45 Treat, as table
salt
46 At hand
47 Put in prison
48 See 22-Down
49 TV pal of Jerry
and George
50 Womb occupant
53 Weather map
feature
55 Unbridled desire
57 June 6, 1944
60 Water filter
brand
61 That, in Tijuana