75 books in 2013 - LibraryThing

Blog redesign! Still not happy with the link colour, or the font, or oh my God the header, but it was fun to do anyway. You'll notice this looks more like a page in a book now (hopefully, anyway) than one of your typical blog designs with the columns and widgets everywhere. Yes. (Okay, there are still some widgets.)

I'm doing the "75 books in 2013" challenge on LibraryThing -- my thread's here. This is unofficially my "SUCK IT, GOODREADS" project for the year. Heh. I'm just so sick of being bullied and hassled in other ways by men over there (not to mention the really horrific bullying -- stalking and harassment, to put it plain -- by would-be "authors" of some reviewers, and the utter inability of GoodReads to respond in anything like a timely and appropriate manner, but let's not even go there). LibraryThing is a lot quieter, and a lot less slickly designed, but it's -- well, yes, quieter. Like a, you know, library.

Quiet is not bad. Obscurity is not bad. Not having 500 "friends" on your social network is not bad. I am almost completely out of step with these our times, I know.

The word “howdy” should probably never appear in a poem

A-fucking-men. 

(For the record, I think Blanco's poem sucked. I also thought the poem from Obama's first inauguration sucked. I don't like that Frost poem, either -- "this land was ours"? Nice one, white man -- and I fucking hated that "drone poem" everyone too hip for the room is raving about. I don't know if there can be such a thing as a good inaugural -- Establishment, if you will -- poem. Think of Ted Hughes writing that awful slop for the Queen. Poetry doesn't go well with official capacities. You'd never catch Emily Dickinson at an inauguration.)

Judge: And what is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: And who told you you were a poet? Who assigned you the rank of poet?
Brodsky: No one. Who assigned me the rank of a human being?
Judge: Did you study for this?
Brodsky: For what?
Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend a school where they teach poets? Where they train you how to be a poet?
Brodsky: I don't think it comes from school.
Judge: From where, then?
Brodsky: I think that it....comes from God.

(source)

waste of breath

Speaking of that (fucking TERRIBLE) book, there's a really odd little moment in it -- when her family buries Lucie's ashes, her sister has two little silver plaques with the first lines of "Lucie's favourite poem" on them - Yeats's "An Irish Airman foresees his Death," which seems a strange choice for a twenty-one-year-old girl without much education whose parents were interested in, respectively, woowoo and yachting. Absolutely nothing is said about what this might mean, which is also odd because it's a very haunting poem -- it speaks of exile, passivity, suspension in limbo, and that seemingly goes with the odd rootless freedom so many Westerners in Japan describe in the book (and which is fetishized in pop culture like, say, Lost in Translation).

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

fun with metrics

reading Wednesday 1/23/2013

FINALLY I catch up and post on the actual Wednesday! It only took about....three and a half weeks, go Moi!

What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!

What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it.  Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored).  Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.

What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.

books read in 2013 - January

Nothing too elaborate for right now; I'm just going to split the record out by month like I did wayy back when I first had a blog, because it's harder to remember what I read when otherwise. And I'm just a little sick of fucking Goodreads at the moment.


The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.

The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.

Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield,  which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.

And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.

Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein.  I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.

Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)

Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.

(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time I kick puppies cultivate my exquisite taste.)

Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.


That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.

Amanda Palmer, "The Assistant" (Live)

reading, uh, SUNDAY, whoops

DAMN I keep forgetting to do this "WWW reading" thing. It's a cool idea, and that's a shame, so....

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

(I'm recovered from the sinusitis, THANK GOD. For now. Judicious use of Sudafed and Afrin, plus Flonase, plus it's been really really foggy around here. Cold, but foggy. ((Husband asked the other day: "How are you enjoying the particulars?" Geek.)) )

Currently reading - My signed, PERSONALLY INSCRIBED copy of Hanne Blank's The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, which is awesome: hilarious, wonderfully written, wry, and incendiary indeed. As one review puts it:

Redefining exercise as "body practice", and treating it as affirming self-care rather than a chore, and acknowledging that it encompasses everything from intense training in a sport to simply moving around and lifting and carrying and bending to get things that have fallen under the entertainment center, and that it's the sort of care every body deserves, is both a radical and a comforting thing.

Recently finished - A reread of Hound of the Baskervilles, a perpetual comfort book (altho that bit about "We chatted about the skulls of the Hottentots and Bushmen" - oy), and What Fresh Hell is This?, a terrible biography of Dorothy Parker (also a reread), sparked off by reading a Nora Ephron column on Dorothy Parker, altho that references a different terrible Dorothy Parker biography. Note to self: write biography of Dorothy Parker that isn't terrible, for sake of own sanity if nothing else. Altho I understand this book is neat, so of course I don't have it. SIGH.

What I might read next - Either The Looming Tower or the new Scientology book, both by Lawrence Wright -- I started reading his stuff when he was writing about ritual Satanic abuse for the New Yorker, so it's nice to see him get a lot of recognition. Maybe the People Who Eat Darkness, even if that sounds fucking terrifying. I seem to have a nonfiction jones right now.

***

INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
DOROTHY PARKER: Need of money, dear.
- Paris Review interview

Merry New Year!

Merry New Year! (and merry marriages!) Photo by T from our apartment house roof.

tiny beautiful things

This came up in a conversation about Captain Awkward - I still think it’s one of the better reviews I’ve ever done.

a review of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

a heaven where some screams have gone

Love. Children. Earning a living. Friends. Drinking. Pushed too far, to do too much. Silent years....

- Elizabeth Smart, journal entry on February 13, 1976

 (quoted in Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and their Famous Literary Partnerships)

reading Wednesday 12/12/2012

Well, Tumblr's working again, so nobody's going to be reading anything else, but I like this idea anyway, and I want to write about BOOKS more on the internet, altho I feel sort of like a small doughty pebble getting swept up in the loud immense 48 fps tide powering down upon us from the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world. Hah.

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions… 

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

 I am Sick as Fucking Hell (it's a technical medical term) with chronic acute sinusitis (which one, you lucky dog? They're both cute, those Sinusitis girls) which has plagued me all my life and ONLY NOW have I found a doctor even remotely sympathetic to the idea that no really, I need long-term antibiotics when this happens and I'm not some kind of Augmentin junkie (that word always throws me off because it makes me think of Le Guin's "Augmentor".....anyway) -- so I've been reading and rereading comfort books. I've been sick since about the end of October (FUCK), so I reread the Holmes canon. All the Holmes canon, even Valley of Fear and The Sign of the Four, which I really truly don't like. I always put off "His Final Problem" until after I've reread all my favourites and then immediately have to fix it with "The Adventure of the Empty House" afterwards, because I am a sap. (It always amazes me Watson doesn't just fucking sucker punch Holmes at the end of "The Dying Detective," but ANYWAY.) I reread Hound of the Baskervilles twice because that was my first Holmes ever and it's my perpetual favourite.

Then I was all out of Holmes. And I was still sick and couldn't focus on anything longer than a shortish novella that didn't have dropped clues all over it and wasn't neatly explained at the end. My eyes were returning to the little morocco case with the seven per cent solution and the syringes (EVERY detail points to Holmes knocking himself out with morphine, can you imagine him on crack?). I was jonesing.  


"I think of slaying Holmes... and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." 
-- Arthur Conan Doyle to his mother, 1891

"You won't! You can't! You mustn't!" 
-- Arthur Conan Doyle's mother


So I went looking for methadone. Years and years ago when you wanted this sort of thing you had to hunt around in shadowy corners and sometimes even suffer hectographitis of the digits or "Xerox lung," but in these digital times you can just order authorized sequels and pastiches downloaded right onto your registered corneas, uh, I mean e-reader. So far have piled up: The Italian Secretary by Caleb Carr, The West End Horror (already read Seven Per Cent Solution a while back) by Nicholas Meyer, Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye, A Slight Trick of the Mind (with grave misgivings) and The House of Silk (with slightly less grave misgivings. Call them coffin misgivings? No?).

Sadly I found Meyer really arch and unreadable -- that's probably a bad side effect of either the sinusitis or the Augmentin, because the day I don't love culture vulture literary references is the day I'm really fucking sick. Also bought Dirda's On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, which was 90% about books other than Holmes, and also really glossed over the imperialism and, yes, racism as completely as the latest shiny "steampunk century" website. That was dreadfully disappointing.  

Dust and Shadow was really surprisingly good -- there was a great working-class original female character who wasn't a dreadful Mary Sue, Watson's narrative voice was just right, and although it was a Holmes v Ripper book, it wasn't horrendously graphic. (Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I now own: five. Number of Holmes v Ripper pastiche novels I owned last week: zero. I amused myself by wittily -- so I thought -- tagging them "Alien v Predator" on LibraryThing, only to get solemnly lectured by someone on Twitter, but then again Twitter seems to drop peoples' IQ numbers right along with that 140-character limit.) I would highly recommend it.

I just couldn't face Trick of the Mind, with droopy older Holmes apparently going all Late-Roth-and-Updike about his past affairs (what?), and oh, my God, House of Silk was bad, just bad. He fluffed Watson's voice, everyone else sounded like fake-Watson as well, the author committed phonetic fake Cockney upon the defenseless characters and reader and never stood in the dock for it, and if Dirda skated right over all the 19th-century prejudices, Anthony Horowitz was apologizing for them every other page. Holmes had never thought of the danger he sent the Irregulars into! Watson had never thought of the people they put away as anything more than just criminals! It was done in the most heavy-handed anachronistic way. I don't think there's anything wrong at all with pointing out the glaring social injustices of other eras -- in fact I think it's necessary -- but when it's done so poorly, the intended criticism is itself undercut and the author just looks hypocritical and patronizing.

Now I'm eyeing Caleb Carr. I really didn't like The Alienist and I tried The Angel of Darkness but just couldn't get through it, so I am not hopeful. What I really want is for Lyndsay Faye to write another Holmes novel, but apparently she's spun off her own series about a former Irish bartender who's now a Yank private dick in the 19th century "in the manner of The Alienist" (groan), so no joy there.

Or I could just reread Hound of the Baskervilles again -- its kick never dulls.  


And so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, Preface to The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

The one. The only....

new yorked

Well, actually, I unsubscribed from the New Yorker when not only could I not access the digital archives, despite subscribing to it on my Kindle, I also couldn't get one answer to about ten (plaintive, not rude!) emails directed to various customer service departments asking how to get access (I did get one canned response: "You need to subscribe!" Uh, thanks). At least I won't have to sit through any more John McPhee articles (I had to read Oranges in grad school, and detested it).

Everything is Everything

Dead Souls

"You should have seen the catch we had! What a great big sturgeon got into the net! What big crucian carp, what enormous mirror carp!"

"It's annoying just listening to you. Why are you always so cheerful?"

"And why should I be depressed, for heaven's sake!" said his host.

"Why be depressed? Because things are depressing."

"You don't eat enough, that's all. Why don't you try to have a good dinner. Depression's only been invented recently: nobody used to be depressed before."

"Oh stop boasting. Are you saying you've never been depressed?"

"Never! I don't know what it is and I don't have the time for it. You wake up in the morning and the chef is already there and you have to order dinner. Then there's tea, then the farm manager, then you go fishing, and then it's dinnertime. You hardly have time for a snooze after dinner and the chef is back, you have to order supper. How do you find the time for depression?"

...."Believe me....that sometimes I'd like to have something to worry about just for a change, but I don't even have anyone who annoys me. I'm depressed, that's all."

- Gogol, Dead Souls (tr. Donald Rayfield)

top albums

Top albums for week ending 7-6.

Dar Williams - You Will Ride With Me Tonight

'What price Chillingborough now?'

- Wanted to check I had the Paul Scott quote below right and Googled it - I don't quite know where my huge copy of the Raj Quartet is, the thick thin-paged closely-printed anthology I dragged with me in my suitcase from New Mexico to Washington State in 1999 - and got sucked RIGHT back in to Guy Perron's narration, nearly all of it on Google Books, Rowan describing his interrogation of Hari Kumar/Harry Coomer....feeling again the kind of inner shudder you do with greatness. All you can do is marvel.

'however disagreeable'

No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James's sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn't quite fall in.

- Virginia Woolf, last full entry in her diary, Saturday 8 March 1941

Footnote: "Cf. 'Henry James' in Desmond MacCarthy's Portraits (1931), p. 155: 'He had been describing to me the spiral of depression which a recent nervous illness had compelled him....to descend...."But it has been good....for my genius." Then he added, "Never cease to watch whatever happens to you."'"

(cf. also Paul Scott, in the Raj Quartet: "And no experience, however disagreeable, is ever wasted.")

"Phenomenal" indeed. The song was inspired by "one of the most haunted places in America," Laura Gibson said in an interview, the Hot Lake Hotel (once the "Mayo Clinic of the West"), where the official video was shot. (West Coast ghost stories are the best ghost stories.)

"beauty will save the world"

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"motherfucker"

The New Yorker appears to have finally crawled up its own asshole and died, arising thereby to a kind of shitless heaven, by having its lead feature be....an endless feature on writing for the New Yorker by New Yorker feature writer John McPhee, the gist of which seems to be, he's John McPhee and we're not. (You might well ask why I still subscribe to the thing, then: I do so digitally in order to have access to the online archives, in which there are stories and articles which are actually good. Or, at least, not all by John McPhee, which amounts to the same thing.)

(He also quotes Woolf entirely out of context and makes her sound stupid. Bah.)

"everyone dances"

Holy shit, it's back!

....also yikes, Blogger has really changed its post interface since I've been here.

hiatus

This blog is on hiatus til I figure out what I want to do with it. (Sentimentally, I don't want to leave Blogspot, since I had my first blog here back in 00!....altho apparently it's lower than Wordpress.)

for years I thought this was just a rumour

'The Cramps, punks, Californian mental patients. The concert of a nembutol delirium. The lines blur, everyone dances.'

'For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.'

Alan Rickman reading Spenser? SWOON.

What though the sea with waues continuall
Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all:
Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought,
For whatsoeuer from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide vnto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

-- The Faerie Queene

Now I also have: mp3s of Alan Rickman acting in radio plays of The Seagull and A Trick To Catch the Old One, AND about FIFTEEN HOURS of him reading Return of the Native. SCORE.

(As I said later to a friend of mine: "The big plus is it's fifteen hours of Alan Rickman reading....and the big minus is, it's fifteen hours of Alan Rickman reading Thomas Hardy.")

Joyce, eat your little Irish heart out

It was bright and sunny. A fine rain had been falling all the morning, and now it had not long cleared up. The iron roofs, the flags of the roads, the flints of the pavements, the wheels and leather, the brass and the tinplate of the carriages--all glistened brightly in the May sunshine. It was three o'clock, and the very liveliest time in the streets.

As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage, that hardly swayed on its supple springs, while the grays trotted swiftly, in the midst of the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing impressions in the pure air, Anna ran over the events of the last days, and she saw her position quite differently from how it had seemed at home. Now the thought of death seemed no longer so terrible and so clear to her, and death itself no longer seemed so inevitable. Now she blamed herself for the humiliation to which she had lowered herself. "I entreat him to forgive me. I have given in to him. I have owned myself in fault. What for? Can't I live without him?" And leaving unanswered the question how she was going to live without him, she fell to reading the signs on the shops. "Office and warehouse. Dental surgeon.
Yes, I'll tell Dolly all about it. She doesn't like Vronsky. I shall be sick and ashamed, but I'll tell her. She loves me, and I'll follow her advice. I won't give in to him; I won't let him train me as he pleases. Filippov, bun shop. They say they send their dough to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good for it. Ah, the springs at Mitishtchen, and the pancakes!"

And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. "Riding, too. Was that really me, with red hands? How much that seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever have believed then that I could come to such humiliation? How conceited and self-satisfied he will be when he gets my note! But I will show him.... How horrid that paint smells! Why is it they're always painting and building? _Modes et robes,_" she read. A man bowed to her. It was Annushka's husband. "Our parasites"; she remembered how Vronsky had said that. "Our? Why our? What's so awful is that one can't tear up the past by its roots. One can't tear it out, but one can hide one's memory of it. And I'll hide it." And then she thought of her past with Alexey Alexandrovitch, of how she had blotted the memory of it out of her life. "Dolly will think I'm leaving my second husband, and so I certainly must be in the wrong. As if I cared to be right! I can't help it!" she said, and she wanted to cry. But at once she fell to wondering what those two girls could be smiling about. "Love, most likely. They don't know how dreary it is, how low.... The boulevard and the children. Three boys running, playing at horses. Seryozha! And I'm losing everything and not getting him back. Yes, I'm losing everything, if he doesn't return. Perhaps he was late for the train and has come back by now. Longing for humiliation again!" she said to herself. "No, I'll go to Dolly, and say straight out to her, I'm unhappy, I deserve this, I'm to blame, but still I'm unhappy, help me. These horses, this carriage--how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage--all his; but I won't see them again."

Thinking over the words in which she would tell Dolly, and mentally working her heart up to great bitterness, Anna went upstairs.

-- tr Garnett

'Gatz'

I would seriously. seriously. seriously. kill to see this. It's my favourite book ever (well, along with Out of Africa and Great Expectations and Jane Eyre and Augustine's Confessions and 1984 and Tender is the Night and Villette and Voyage in the Dark, but you get the idea).

A Novel ‘Gatsby’: Stamina Required

By BEN BRANTLEY

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — What happens between a novel and a consenting reader is usually a deeply personal activity, occurring behind the closed doors of individual minds. It is arguably more intimate and subjective than sex. And if someone asked you, “Want to watch me read a book for the next six or seven hours?” you would probably — and wisely — decline.

Yet this is the invitation being extended by Elevator Repair Service’s “Gatz,” at the American Repertory Theater here through Sunday. And to turn down the offer would be to miss one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years.

“Gatz” is a word-for-word presentation of the entire text of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel and a work that has never been successfully translated to the screen. Occupying roughly six hours of performance time (not counting two intermissions and a dinner break), “Gatz” has no period sets or costumes, and no full-fleshed interpretations of any of the book’s characters. You could even say that although the show has a terrific 13-member ensemble, there is only one real character in “Gatz.” That’s you, dear reader.

Set in a shabby business office of indeterminate professional purpose, this remarkable play follows the seduction of one man (Scott Shepherd) by one novel. And it’s as thorough an evocation as any work of art I’ve encountered of how a book can so take over your life that you start to see everything through its sensibility.

“Gatz” was one of three productions I caught here last weekend (all presented by the American Repertory Theater) that are trying to redefine the relationship between plays and audiences, erasing distance and blurring genres....“Gatz” is the least literally interactive. Directed by John Collins and first produced in Brussels in 2006 (with a New York run expected this fall), it does not seek to destroy physically the wall between audience and actors....Yet for me “Gatz” was the most transporting, traveling to an ineffable place that theater is not expected to inhabit: the corridor between written words and a reader’s perception of them.

The road to Fitzgerald’s poetically imagined fictional universe begins in the land of the flatly prosaic. Louisa Thompson’s ingeniously dismal, realistic set creates an urban work space where nothing looks clean and everything — including the office’s one computer — appears to be secondhand. It is here that one of the employees (Mr. Shepherd) discovers a battered paperback copy of “The Great Gatsby.”

He begins to read it aloud to himself, with no particular flair or ardor. Other people drift in and out, delivering mail and picking up the phone (though you can never make out what they say) or just goofing off, as Mr. Shepherd continues to read. And little by little, his fellow office workers become the characters described by Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator. That includes Nick’s mysterious, party-giving Long Island neighbor, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan, the girl with the voice of money.

A couple of years ago I had seen and much admired Elevator Repair Service’s “Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928),” which brought the complete text of a chapter of that Faulkner novel to theatrical life. That was a piece for connoisseurs of experimental theater and experimental fictional narrative.

“Gatz” is much more accessible (as is Fitzgerald’s novel, compared with Faulkner’s). But it is also richer and more subtle in its ultimate achievement. Throughout the show, the relationship between what is read and its context keeps shifting, with the real world finally giving way entirely to the fictive one. This is achieved partly through the sound design of Ben Williams, wherein traffic noises melt into the sounds of chirping crickets or jazz orchestras, and Mark Barton’s superb transformative lighting.

But the most astonishing metamorphosis is that undergone by the cast, whose interpretations of Fitzgerald’s creations go from quotation-mark-framed stiffness or jokiness into a style that is compellingly sincere without ever being purely naturalistic. Mr. Shepherd, in a performance of symphonic calibration, progresses from detached curiosity to intense engagement to an emotional fluency that allows him to discard the book altogether and recite from memory.

By the end, he has become Nick Carraway. So have you. And as can happen when you’re caught up in a book, you’re surprised to discover that so many hours have passed, and that you’re still inside your own body, a bit stiffened from sitting for so long.

-- New York Times

Nitpick (yes I am that kind of person): Daisy doesn't have 'the voice of money.' Her voice is FULL of money. It might seem an overly picky distinction, but not to Fitzgerald:

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked.
"It's full of -- " I hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.
That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money -- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it....high in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....


"Did you ever see an amusement park?"
"No, Father."
"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place--under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts--and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon--like a big yellow lantern on a pole."
Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.
"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."

-- "Absolution" (supposedly a discarded prologue to an early version of The Great Gatsby)

Celestial Eyes -- from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece, by Charles Scribner III

Anthony Lane on "The Red Shoes"

Photograph from Red Shoes verdoux post.

By popular demand, “The Red Shoes” is returning for another run at Film Forum, beginning February 19th. New York has always been kind to the movie, which, to the dismay of its creators, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, faltered and flopped when it opened on British screens in 1948. Salvation arrived in the form of the Bijou Theatre, at Broadway and Forty-fifth Street, where the film showed for more than two years. Ballet-crazy children—or “half the little girls in America,” as Powell put it—were an important sector of that audience, and I trust that some of them, now in their limber seventies, will head downtown to reforge an old acquaintance.

What will they find? A blindingly rich and refulgent print, digitally restored by the Film Foundation and the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive. I’ve seen the same version on DVD, but watching “The Red Shoes,” whatever the quality, on the small screen is like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw. The movie should fill one’s vision no less comprehensively than a sunset, and Powell, like Turner before him—another hearty, romantic Englishman, whose eye gloried unashamedly in a given world—knew that reds, even at their most flaming, are never the whole story of a sunset. Consider Boris Lermontov (the incomparable Anton Walbrook), the impresario of a ballet company, who strolls into breakfast in a full-length gown of verdigris and gold. No Chinese emperor was more resplendently arrayed. As for the cigarette that he holds out, half smoked, to be taken and deposited by his valet, a whole civilization—urbane, authoritative, preposterous, and doomed—resides in that single gesture.

The film is a legend built on a legend. Lermontov, having acquired a new prima ballerina, Vicky Paige (Moira Shearer), plus a new composer, Craster (Marius Goring), mounts a production of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes,” in which a woman is danced to death by her own footwear. We see that work in its entirety, and the abandon with which it is sprung from the prison of the auditorium, into an unfeasible freedom of space, glances back to the opening scenes of Olivier’s “Henry V” (1944) and forward to “An American in Paris” (1951). Yet this is not, in the end, a film about ballet; it is a hymn to the risks of investing all that you are, and have, in the fugue and fury of the imaginative act. Look at Vicky as she dances solo, to a crummy gramophone, in a tiny London theatre on a rainy afternoon. She is not yet a star, but Lermontov has come to observe her; we see first his face, watching fiercely, and then hers, staring back—a milk-white death mask, filling the frame, with red and black dashes swooping from the corners of her eyes, and lips gleaming like the poisoned apple in “Snow White.” It is the most striking closeup in the history of cinema: not for Powell the yearning of Garbo, or the perplexity that Bergman found in Liv Ullmann, but a sudden, bright ecstasy that verges on the demonic, and more than enough, you might think, to scare those girls of 1948 out of their tutus. “The Red Shoes” is both suitable for children and beyond their ken: it treats art not as sedative or diversionary but as hard and supercharged, quite lethal to the danceless rhythms that most of our lives obey. No wonder Britain, still rationed in color, food, and feeling in the wake of an exhausting war, could not cope with what the movie proposed. Catch it here now, and you will not just be seeing an old film made new; you will have your vision restored.

-- Anthony Lane, New Yorker

Red Shoes Criterion Collection page - Red Shoes Powell and Pressburger page

We had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go and die for Art.

Photograph from Cornel Lucas Collection.