"The American" - George Clooney as Takakura Ken
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Sweet Spot, part 2
Combining the interests of all four of the readers of this blog: The publication of the English translation of a novel by Roberto Bolaño, written during the last five years of his life and discovered among his papers. The hero of "The Third Reich" is a wargamer, skilled at a board game called "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", which actually exists.
Published a year ago in Spanish, the book has already gotten a lot of on-line interest in the gaming community...
Adding to the hysteria in certain circles is the planned initial publication of the translation in The Paris Review in four installments over the next year.
Should all movies that aim to be hard boiled...
...be shot low-budget -- spare resources for a tone similar to abstemious prose?
"Winter’s Bone" director [Debra] Granik, the only woman on the panel, related how the low-budget film was shot with $2 million, in part by using practical locations, a small lighting package and a fleet documentary-style crew that could move quickly and re-set shots. “I don’t think it would have made it a better film” to have $4 million, she said. “A frugal budget was commensurate with our goals.”
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Sweet Spot
Jeff Vandermeer's top thirteen list, which seems a bit too posh even for the level of pretension around the Tulkinghorn house (Czech fantasies!), does mention this book, which I had missed, and which seems to push all the local buttons. And it's part of a series!
Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey (Eos)–
The Sandman Slim series is urban fantasy on speed, with Kadrey mixing of noir, pop culture, horror, hardboiled fiction, and everything in between. The result is endlessly inventive and high-octane—it should be difficult for reader to keep track of characters and the plot with so much kinetic energy flying off the page, but Kadrey’s an excellent writer who’s able to juggle all of it without dropping a single pin. Zombie plagues, vampires, angels, and more populate Kadrey’s Los Angeles, the appeal of his fiction the ability to rejuvenate the familiar. Kill the Dead is a worthy follow-up to its predecessor, with its even more down-and-out freelance detective James Stark in danger of going to Hell for his crimes. It’s hard not to steal William Gibson’s description of the first volume as “like watching Sergio Leone and Clive Barker codirect from a script by Jim Thompson and S. Clay Wilson.”
Monday, February 7, 2011
Can't remember the last time...
...I pre-ordered new music.
Wanted to put up a video of the Old School country song "I Wanna Die Young (At a Very Old Age)," by the recently deceased Charlie Louvin, but couldn't find an embed. The sentiments, though ("Wet behind the ears though my hair is gray"), I endorse heartily.
Lots of Moorcock
A fabulous interview/analysis in the Guardian by a guy named Hari Kunzru. Moorcock looks a lot like Fidel Castro these days... Cool quotes:
In contrast to the rural decencies of Tolkien, Moorcock's writing belongs to an urban tradition, which celebrates the fantastical city as a place of chance and mystery. The wondrous spaces of M John Harrison, China Miéville, Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe and Alan Moore are all part of this, as are Iain Sinclair's London, Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, the part-virtual cyberpunk mazes of William Gibson and the decadent Paris of the Baudelarian flâneur. Like these other urban fantasists, Moorcock delights in a kind of sublime palimpsest, in imagining an environment that through size, age, scale or complexity exceeds our comprehension, producing fear and awe.
.......
Elric, a decadent albino weakling, is amoral, perhaps even evil. As a not-so-metaphorical junkie, Elric allowed Moorcock to revel in unwholesomeness, and helped return fantasy to its roots in the late romanticism of the decadents, a literary school close to Moorcock's heart. ... Elric is part Maldoror, part Yellow Book poseur and part William Burroughs; within a few years of his first appearance in 1961, British culture suddenly seemed to be producing real-life Elrics by the dozen, as Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and others defined an image of the English rock star as an effeminate, velvet-clad lotus-eater. Moorcock was very popular among musicians, and it's tempting to see him as co-creator of the butterfly-on-a-wheel character, which still wanders the halls of English culture in guises ranging from Sebastian Horsley to Russell Brand.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
The Dog
Two passages from The Dog of The South, by Charles Portis, copied by opening on the desktop my Kindle's "clippings.txt" file. Turns out to be so easy that the temptation will always be to quote too much. No page numbers, of course, just "locations."
The Dog of the South (Charles Portis) - Highlight Loc. 278-85 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 04:21 PM
I decided that she was probably out for an afternoon of city obstruction and I went to the west side of town and cruised the parking lots of the big shopping centers looking for her car. On certain days of the week she and several hundred other biddies would meet at these places and get their assignments, first having taken care to park their Larks and Volvos and Cadillacs across the painted lines and thus taking up two parking spaces, sometimes three. Then they would spread out over town. Some would go to supermarkets and stall the checkout lines with purse-fumbling and check-writing. Others would wait for the noon rush at cafeterias and there bring the serving lines to a crawl with long deliberative stops at the pie station. The rest were on motor patrol and they would poke along on the inside lanes of busy streets and stop cold for left turns whenever they saw a good chance to stack up traffic. Another trick was to stick the nose of a car about halfway into a thoroughfare from a side street, thereby blocking all traffic in that lane.The Dog of the South (Charles Portis) - Highlight Loc. 312-23 | Added on Saturday, January 29, 2011, 04:34 PM
In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn’t going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.This is fairly representative material. Amusing, but the book is just one passage like this after another, organized as loosely as humanly possible around a journey, and by the mid-point it left me feeling slightly nauseous, as if I'd eaten too much marzipan.
Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest. JACKSONVILLE FLA OR BUST. I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn’t bust.
The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn’t believe that the bottom ones weren’t being crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature’s tricks with curved surfaces. Topology!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Bellow twice
Opening sentence of "The Adventures of Augie March":
“I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record on my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
From a letter to Bernard Malamud, setting out his intentions for "Augie":
“I took a position in writing this book. I declared against what you call the constructivist approach. A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay.”
(h/t Paris Review Daily. If all Bellow's letters are that good.... Seems like a proper book to me.)
Monday, January 31, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Fifty years in the making
A photograph of J.D. Salinger -- last previously available photo taken about fifty years ago. Salinger on the right. Doesn't look like a loon to me.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
John Irving on readers and critics
From the Reader's Guide interview published in the Kindle edition of "A Widow for One Year:"
In terms of understanding the effect of my novels, I learn much more from the letters readers write to me than I do from book reviews. You don't read a book the way a reader reads a book when you know you're going to write about it. I know -- I've been a reviewer, too, after all."Emotionally inscrutable" is a notion obviously closely related to several versions of the hip and the cool; the roots of which Greil Marcus finds in the "deadpan" tone that defines a lot of American culture. Although "Widow" has three major characters who are novelists, with sections ot eh their work interpolated, Irving is not arch or arms-length enough to qualify as a post-modern writer. But he definitely wants the pipes and girders of his story-building to be a visible part of the experience, and he's not above waving and pointing if he thinks there's a chance we'll miss them. ("A John Irving novel is not subtle," he says.) Not po-mo, then, but perhaps a literary adaptation of the architectural style known as Structural Expressionism, which puts its beams and wiring in plain sight.
…
HG: You are often accused of being a sentimentalist…
JI: I've already defined the word by admitting that it is my intention, as a novelist, to move you to laughter and tears, and that I use the language to persuade you emotionally, not intellectually. In Great Expectations, Dickens wrote: "Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlaying our hard hearts." But we are ashamed of our tears. We live at a time when critical taste tells us that to be soft-hearted is akin to doltishness; we're so influenced by the junk on television and in the movies that even in reacting against it we overreact -- we conclude that any attempt to move an audience to laughter and tears is shameless crowd-pleasing, is akin to sitcom or soap opera or melodrama.
To the modern critic, when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already guilty. But, for a writer, it is craven to so fear sentimentality that one avoids it altogether. To be emotionally inscrutable has become a predictable fingerprint of the "literary" author. I wouldn't want to be married to someone who was C. Who would ever want to be in a relationship like that? Well, I don't want a novelist to be emotionally inscrutable, either. In a novel, sentimental risks are essential; concealing one's emotions is a form of political correctness, which is a kind of cowardice.
...
Modernism in literature upholds the theory that a novel can be a patternless mess (without a plot) because real life is like that. Well, good novels, in my view, are better made than real life. ... Great stories are constructed -- they have a structure.
Also occurs to me that the controversial innovations in criticism in the 1970s (Kael, Marcus) were partly aimed at persuding critics to be readers (or moviegoers) first.
And of course we also spurn arms-length and/or emotionally inscrutable music.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Not skinny, and with normal hair...
MMA champ Gina Carano, star of Steven Soderburgh's upcoming "Haywire".
Monday, January 10, 2011
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Generation K?
On the 720 Express bus on Wilshire this morning, I was one of three people reading something on a Kindle. The other two were rather younger than myself, either college age or not long past it. The 720 may not offer a representative sample because it's a direct line to UCLA, but still, it leads me question the view that only old people are using these devices because only old people still read.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Lars von Trier to make BBC directing debut?
Doctor to Marry His Own Daughter, Create Rift in Time and Space
BBC America has announced that David Tennant is engaged to Georgia Moffett. Tennant very popularly played the 10th incarnation of The Doctor on BBC’s long-running Doctor Who. Moffett played his daughter (actually a quasi-clone based on his DNA) in one episode during his tenure. As if that wasn’t strange enough, Moffett is also the real-life daughter of Peter Davison, who played the 5th incarnation of The Doctor. Whether or not you can wrap your head around the space-time implications, we certainly wish them well!
You call that a list? This is a list.
From personable "LA Weekly" film critic Karina Longworth.
10. ENTER THE VOID - Gaspar Noé
9. THE GHOST WRITER - Roman Polanski
8. SHUTTER ISLAND - Martin Scorsese
7. EVERYONE ELSE - Maren Ade
6. THE RED CHAPEL - Mads Brügger
5. SOMEWHERE - Sofia Coppola
4. DOGTOOTH - Giorgos Lanthimos
3. DADDY LONGLEGS - Josh and Benny Safdie
2. GREENBERG - Noah Baumbach
1. TRASH HUMPERS - Harmonie Korine
Are you man enough?
Breaking my silence to pass on a dare:
Make a resolution to read only the books in your To Be Read stack for as long as you can in 2011. Start on New Year's Day and see how long you last.
To enter just leave a link to your blog in a comment on the registration post. Post one of the buttons here on your blog as well. Please link back to this page to help spread the word.
Monday, January 3, 2011
QT's Best of '10
1. Toy Story 3
2. The Social Network
3. Animal Kingdom
4. I Am Love
5. Tangled
6. True Grit
7. The Town
8. Greenberg
9. Cyrus
10. Enter The Void (“Hands down best credit scene of the year … Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.”)
And the runners up are:
11. Kick Ass
12. Knight and Day
13. Get Him To The Greek
14. The Fighter
15. The Kings Speech
16. The Kids Are All Right
17. How To Train Your Dragon
18. Robin Hood
19. Amer
20. Jackass 3-D
Saturday, January 1, 2011
"...not easy."
Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.-- Mario Vargas Llosa, Stockholm, December 7, 2010
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