This afternoon there’s nothing to do but snow haiku. My attempts at 5, 7, 5:
Full fat flake fell far
To sleep on the rude pavement.
Grraaawwwr. The shovel. Run!
Snowflake: distinctive,
Unique. Liquefies, blends. A
Loss, but less lonely
All New York today
Is slush. Slip, fall, “Have a hand!”
We shyly love mess
Snow meets us, observes,
Turns gray and thick in protest.
It is a critique.
Dr. Zhivago
Cried “Tanya” not “Lara” when
Fevered. Oh poor man.
You can do this too
On a cold slushy day in
February. Go.
Eighty-four degrees
Can only mean winter
In SoSoSoHo
(The last one is from my editor, who’s in South Florida.)
[DIngbats]
I am catching up on “Girls,” which is on HBO on Sunday nights and is often compared to “Sex and the City.” They’re identical in main subject matter, four girls in New York looking for life, but they’re different in interesting ways. In “Sex and the City” Samantha was looking for sex, Charlotte sought love with the right sort of man, Carrie wanted a particular man and to make sense of the world through her work, and Miranda was in search of the locus of the resentments that caused her chronic unhappiness.
All had adventures along the way. There was an emphasis on glamour.
In “Girls,” Hannah wants fame, Marnie wants status, Jessa wants to be cool at any cost, and Shoshanna wants to be normal but doesn’t know what normal is or looks like and is constantly confused by her friends’ cues.
On “Sex and the City” they had careers but were not precisely careerist. On “Girls” they want careers but have no demonstrated capabilities.
On “Sex and the City” the subtext was friendship. In “Girls” the subtext is competition. It is a truer show in a material sense, but a colder one. People aren’t really nice to each other. There’s a sense of grieving over something that isn’t quite named. There’s little emphasis on glamour.
The differences in the tone and mood of the two shows is explainable in part by the fact that the characters in “Sex” were in their 30s and the characters in “Girls” are in their 20s and just out of school. They’re more lost, less fully formed. They’re trying to get a start on who they will become but can’t gain purchase because they don’t yet know who they are.
But watching, I thought the show’s creators were saying, or simply reflecting in their work, that young and academically credentialed girls now are a little more lost, a lot less fully formed than young women in past eras. The great recession is a quiet presence. It’s hard to get a job; sometimes Hannah acts as if she’s scrounging for food. The parents of the characters are mostly affluent flakes who wouldn’t have taught their kids much beyond the idea of rising.
“Sex and the City” had an air of rebellion. “Girls” is living in the middle of what the rebellion wrought.