Florence Pugh topless in episodes 3 and 4 of East of Eden

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1. The pregnant boobs are prosthetics, right?

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2. Feels like Christmas, I love some Pugh.

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3. She’s built like Hilary Clinton.

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4. Big potatoes

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5. Is a new version of “East of Eden” really something people will be interested in now? I don’t know, because it wasn’t the kind of book I ever wanted to read, but I guess it was a big success 60-70 years ago, and is still remembered enough for someone to pony up the money for a re-make. Maybe it’s the soap opera aspect, or maybe it’s a great story and I’m a lowbrow Philistine.

   PS – “pony up the money” is probably an obsolete idiom, but I couldn’t thin of better one. “Come up with the cash” seem too…Philistiny, I guess.

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   1. Steinbeck’s literary reputation is kind of odd. American critics mostly thought he was meh. He wasn’t a dazzling craftsman and his ideas and themes were not subtle. But he was popular as hell, he’s been required reading in high schools for over 75 years, and he won the Nobel Prize (although notes from the committee show that even there he wasn’t all that respected). I read The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men like probably 80% of high schoolers. I tried East of Eden, his self-described magnum opus, and couldn’t put a dent in it (the movie versions cover only the very last part of the novel).

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      1. You know, I think I got Steinbeck confused with some other mid-20th century novelist, one more middling and forgotten than Steinbeck. But I cannot think of his name. Being a novel from the author of “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men”, this re-make makes more sense to me now.

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         1. Bet you’re thinking of Faulkner.

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            1. Nope, I was thinking of John O’Hara. I thought his reputation had dwindled over the years. I have no idea now if that is correct.

      2. I don’t think I have ever read any of his books voluntarily, but as a baby boomer who went to a prep school and then majored in literature, I must have read a shitload for classes: Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, Travels With Charlie, etc. I never found him any better than competent as a wordsmith. I have not read East of Eden because it was never required, and because I am no fan of magna opera. To be candid, I have never even made it all the way through the James Dean film, although I have probably watched the entire film if one adds together all the snippets in all the years.

         I am completely OK with the characterization of his writing as “meh.”

         But he was a voice for the downtrodden and an articulate critic of the abuses of capitalism in the depression years, and as such his work from that time tends to exalt him as a spokesman for a generation of working-class Americans, a sort of guitar-free version of Woody Guthrie.

         I think it was Steinbeck who first taught me about the realities of capitalism, and shook me out of the innocence of childhood. While the passage below from The Grapes of Wrath is not at all a masterpiece of writing, its simple, direct eloquence moved me and awakened my social consciousness when I was a young teen. I remember being horrified by a reality I had never imagined in my Howdy Doody childhood, thinking that there was something deeply wrong with any system that engages in the wholesale destruction of food while people are starving.
         

         The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

         The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

         And the smell of rot fills the country.

         Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

         There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

         The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

         I remember running to ask my parents whether that really happened, whereupon they just shrugged their shoulders with heavy resignation, choosing not to recall the worst parts of a time that they had moved on from and would prefer to forget.

         So perhaps Steinbeck deserved that Nobel Prize for helping those of us born into cozy post-war prosperity to understand – really understand viscerally – the sort of world our parents and grandparents had endured and, if among the fortunate, had survived.

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         1. I’m kind of a philistine and also Canadian. Was never required to read Steinbeck but I did read this awhile back.

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            1. That pretty much sums it up. I have never liked that book/play.

6. She also shows off her glorious ass in a scene from this series; it’s quick, but clearly visible and well-lit.

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   1. That is a nice ass. Round and sumptuous.

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7. Because she has some avant-garde fashion tastes, she’s one of those chicks who I find more attractive when she’s in a movie role than in real life.

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8. As part of the discussion of Steinbeck and his history, I’d like to add that there’s a whole lotta fucking in this series and I’m here for it. Flo is still my little nugget of joy.

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