Wednesday

Sunshine's poised to finish her book by the August four deadline. I don't know how she's managing it while also learning Vietnamese full time. To facilitate, I leave the house several evenings per week, granting her productive alone time in our tiny unit. Today was an out-of-the-house day. I headed off to eat lunch at Foggy Bottom's Sizzling Express, which includes a limited sushi counter and hot bar along with the expansive ever-changing salad buffet. Among today's choices: blood oranges, jicama, kiwi, and dolmades. I wonder if the swankly modern name abbreviation codified on the window sign--Sizzex!*--is an intentional nod to latter-day urban slang. After the salad, I walked to the E Street Theater to see Lady Chatterley (2006),* the latest remake of D.H. Lawrence's sensational meditation on basic instinct. Lawrence self-published his book in Italy two years before his death; or thirty-one years before it was finally published in the US and thirty-two before it appeared in obscenity hearings in England.* But this book was written in three versions, the third being the haughtily philosophical Lady Chatterley's Lover we all read beneath our teenaged beds. The previous version, entitled John Thomas and Lady Jane, while preserving all major characters and relationships, streamlines those juxtapositions that more acutely examine a thesis of class versus physical identity through the optic of sex and nature. It does this in a more "show-don’t-tell" manner. It's this book which inspired the movie I saw today, an internal and intermittently staid eavesdropping into the adulterous renaissance of one Constance Chatterley, newly-disappointed with her marriage to a lamed veteran and blooming with uncomfortable feelings for the gamekeeper. It would be impossible to overuse the adjective "earthy" describing a movie which so cleaves to the literal ties between rebirth and soil. Sizzex indeed. [Cavin]