Word: wifely
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...back to his dapper self in Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach and animated, in gloriously anachronistic stop-motion, by Mark Gustafson. In his corduroy suit, Mr. F. is a woodsy gentleman crook, a raffish Raffles specializing in chickens. When his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep) becomes pregnant, Fox retires to write a newspaper column and help raise his underachieving son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman). Yet the artist in Fox yearns to pull off one last heist: raiding the farms of Franklin Bean (Michael Gambon) and two other big landowners...
McKellen almost redeems the miniseries as Two. The leader has a story of his own, including an ailing wife and a rebellious son. Two has less control over his family and their love than he does over the Village, and McKellen's wonderfully calibrated performance combines arrogance and secret pain. Whatever the Village's purpose, it has not solved Two's problems...
Apart from his wife, the pivotal figure in Carver's adult life was Gordon Lish, an influential fiction editor at Esquire magazine who later became a power in book publishing. In 1970, when Carver was 32, Lish gave him his first crucial exposure in Esquire--but at a price. He revised Carver's manuscripts extensively, cutting out whole pages, changing titles, expelling lyrical passages and moments of uplift. The result was a set of stories more terse and elliptical than the originals, more "minimalist," which was how Carver's early style came to be known...
Also, by the late '70s, Carver and his wife had sobered up. When their brains cleared, the marriage dissolved, though not bitterly. You might say they had loved each other to a draw. Carver met and eventually married the poet Tess Gallagher, who would see him through his last, highly productive years before his death in 1988 from lung cancer. These are the years of his crowning achievement, Cathedral, a magnificent story collection with greater emotional range than his earlier published work. Lish edited that book too, but lightly. By then Carver was too big to be revised by anybody...
David Kistner's midcareer switch to green cleaning was prompted by another life-changing experience: having kids. In 2002, Kistner was working as a consultant in the aviation industry and his wife Effie was expecting their first child. (They ended up having twin boys.) The baby books he devoured contained a fact that caught his attention: pregnant women and infants should avoid dry cleaning because of the toxic chemicals used in the process. When he had trouble finding a greener cleaner in New York City, Kistner had an epiphany - he'd start his own. The result is Green Apple Cleaners...