August 24: "The Help," Kathryn Stockett, Brave Boy

My son, who is two-years-old, had to get blood drawn yesterday.  It was nothing serious.  He is starting a preschool program this fall, and he needed to get a lead level and a few other tests.  My wife went with him to the lab.  She held one of his arms.  A lab tech held his other arm.  Another lab tech drew the blood.  My wife said he didn't make a sound, just sat there, even when the lab tech started moving her needle around to find a vein.  Frankly, I thought it was going to be a horrible scene, with much screaming and struggling.  Nope.  He just leaned into my wife a little when it got painful.  He's a pretty brave little kid.

My brave son

So I did see The Help last night.  It was just as good as I thought it was going to be.  It managed to avoid sentimentality, for the most part.  It did have the feel of a big Hollywood movie that was made to snag a lot of awards.  Viola Davis was superb.  Octavia Spencer was quite good, as well.  I haven't been a big fan of Emma Stone, but she really pulled off the part of Skeeter without becoming the token white character trying to save the African Americans.  Bryce Dallas Howard made a great villain.

Faithful readers of my blog may remember that I read Kathryn Stockett's novel for book club quite a few months ago.  Faithful readers will also remember that I struggled to get it finished for the meeting night.  It's not that I didn't like the book.  I did.  But I've been having a hard time getting books read on time for a while.  Now that I've seen the film adaptation of The Help, I may have to go back and give the novel a closer reading.  It may be a book I'd teach in the future, if I can get used to the dialect I recall Stockett using.  (Generally, I think dialect in any book is a big mistake.)

With this post, I'm testing a theory.  You see, the second most popular post I've ever written was about Kate Moses and the book Cakewalk.  I don't understand the traffic it has gotten.  I can only surmise that people searching for Kate Moses have stumbled upon my blog.  Therefore, I'm going to see if putting Kathryn Stockett's name in the title of this post has a similar effect.  Call it an experiment.  If I end up with 300 hits on this post, I may just start putting popular author's names in the titles of every one of my posts.


This is a test of the emergency hit-generating system

Saint Marty is just trying to be a little scientific (and shamelessly self-promoting).