"I am pleased with Obama. I think he's brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him . . .. [I]t would be good . . . if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." -- film director Woody Allen, fresh from his not-particularly surprising statement supporting Roman Polanski.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
I'll have the risotto with calamari in its ink, please.
The protean China Mieville has just published his new novel, Kraken, in which contemporary London is menaced by a giant squid (!) The Guardian review is here. (Is it too much to ask that book reviewers in the United States -- the only country, after all, in which I will ever live -- pay attention to literary sf?) Cool quote:
The exuberant energy and ambition of Kraken make for a complex novel packed with fascinating and original concepts. Miéville powers through that conceptual density with an action-filled plot, a technique that has served him well in earlier novels. But here the combined weight of ideas and plot press down on the characters, which struggle to grow beyond entertaining pop-cultural caricatures. For this reason the novel misses the emotional resonance and mythic qualities of the greatest urban fantasies, such as Neil Gaiman's American Gods or Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. For readers who are drawn to fantasy precisely for those qualities, Kraken may seem like a handsome but empty cadaver missing its emotional heart. But for Miéville's dedicated and growing readership, Kraken succeeds in reforming the urban fantasy around a tougher, funnier and more intellectually demanding core.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Brown student discusses Hollywood
Interesting piece in the Daily Mail about Emma Watson, who sounds miserable. Unhappy college students usually don't merit much notice, but this seems a special case. (She had to give up being cox on the crew team because the university couldn't afford the insurance. He boyfriends sound like assholes. She was in Three Sisters, but the student newspaper wasn't allowed to review her performance...) What made me think she'd be OK was this, which sounds like the snotty Ivy Leaguer she has every right to be:
'The scripts all have happy endings, they're really badly written and they are sending them to an English literature student,' she says, rather sniffily of the parts she has so far been offered.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
"The music in my head" (The Jack Reacher Playlist)
To calm down, I ran music through my head. The chorus to "Smokestack Lightning." The Howling Wolf version puts a wonderful strangled cry at the end of the first line. They say you need to ride the rails for a while to understand the traveling blues. They're wrong. To understand the traveling blues you need to be locked down somewhere. In a cell. Or in the army. Someplace where you're caged. Someplace where smokestack lightning looks like a faraway beacon of impossible freedom. I lay there with my coat as a pillow and listened to the music in my head. At the end of the third chorus, I fell asleep.'
-- Jack Reacher, in Lee Child's Killing Floor, 1997.
Bobby Bland
Wild Child Butler
Blind Blake
Robert Johnson
John Lee Hooker
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Close to perfect...
Embed code for "Justified" (Season 1, Episode 8, "Blowback") appears to be buggy.
My home decor fantasy...
...from a source that resonates.
"Mr. Child believes books make a room visually chaotic and that displaying them is pretentious."
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Isn't the real opposition...
...this...
...as opposed to this?
And isn't the choice a bit easier, now?
Art or kitsch? Or is that a stupid question?
One of these is in the Tate in London. The other isn't.
Is there really much to choose between them?
Frank Frazetta, Abbott & Moffat
Frank Frazetta
Abbott & Moffat -- behind "Variety's" frakking firewall.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Sotiria Bellou
This is a light-hearted tune beloved by Gail Holst, author of Road To Remebtika: "I wore out the records I had of Sotiria Bellou -- for me she is still the best of the female rembetika singers, with a voice as deep as a man's and as full of pain as Billie Holiday's. ... Her version of "San pethano sto karavi" -- "If I Die on the Boat" -- makes my hair stand on end, although I must have listened it a thousand times."
"San Penthano Sto Karavi" ("If I Die on the Boat")
"Ah, if I die, what will they say? Some fellow died,
A fellow who loved life and enjoyed himself. Aman! Aman!
Ah, if I die on the boat, throw me into the sea,
So that the black fish and the salt water can eat me. Aman! Aman!"
Anonymous, circa 1920
Spot the new PM!
Reminds me of Tulkinghorn's college days (but not mine)... Check out Boris's socks.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Friends
Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens both have autobiographical books out . That's Hitchens on the left ; the guy in the middle is James Fenton.
The WSJ is on the case:
They were first introduced by a mutual friend in 1973, when Mr. Hitchens was beginning his career at British magazine the New Statesman and Mr. Amis was about to publish his first novel, "The Rachel Papers." Through the years, they've occasionally chased after the same women, defended one another publicly during media storms and scandals, met for regular dinners with their mutual friends Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, the poet James Fenton and Salman Rushdie, and supported each other through marriages and divorces. "James Fenton once said wearily, 'You and the Hitch ought to get married,' " Mr. Amis says.
.......
Mr. Hitchens writes about how Mr. Amis shaped his writing, describing how his friend often underlined clichés or misused words in his essays and articles and handed him the marked up pages like a disapproving professor. It was Mr. Amis who taught him not to subordinate style to substance when crafting an argument, Mr. Hitchens says."He wrote to me recently saying he thought I'd misused the word 'infamous,'" Mr. Hitchens says. "I'm absolutely sure this is an injustice on his part."
Mr. Amis says Mr. Hitchens rarely requires his editing these days, except when it comes to punctuation. "He's touchingly all thumbs with the colon and the semi colon," he says.
Bordwell on Dragon Tattoo...
A long discussion of the structure of fiction and movies with detailed analysis of Millenium I from David Bordwell. Many here like this sort of thing -- all that outlining and page counting....
Bordwell cool quotes, most of which you guys already know:
.....a movie may display three parts, or four, or more (if the film is very long) or even two (if it’s unusually short). When the film has four parts, it tends to split the long second act that the manuals recommend into two.A four-parter usually goes like this. A Setup lays down the circumstances and establishes the primary characters’ goals. The Complicating Action is a sort of counter-setup, modifying the original goals or creating new ones. At about the midpoint, there emerges a Development section characterized by delays, subplots, and backstory. There follows the Climax, which resolves the action by decisively achieving or failing to achieve the protagonist’s goals. The film typically ends with a brief Epilogue that establishes a settled state, happy or unhappy. Each of these sections is demarcated by a turning point—a moment of crisis, usually involving an unforeseen twist or a major decision by the protagonist.
With reference to the Dragon novel:
So I’m proposing a 138-page setup, a 150-page Complicating Action, and a 154-page Development. If you consider my two climaxes a single stretch, you have a 149-page climax section..... That makes the big parts roughly equal, with a tailpiece of 16 pages. the three-act/ four-part template provides a solid architecture for the plot.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Flesh and Stone, post-anticipation
I'm ready now to adopt the words of the Guardian Doctor-blogger as my own... Only might add to it that it could be the best episode of ANY television series ever.
Please watch it. If you live in the US, you can catch part 1 of the two-parter on BBC America at various times this week and then the staggering part 2 next Saturday night.
All those guys who get paid millions of dollars to write scripts for comic book movies, but who can't come up with a story of sufficient consequence to make it worth while to leave the house? They should be forced to watch these two episodes of Doctor Who. Chris Carter and George Lucas? If any given five minutes of the X Files movies or the second (first) Star Wars trilogy had been as good as this, their names would not be synonyms for 'lame' on five continents...
Seriously.
Peter O'Donnell
New York Times obituary
Modesty Blaise comic strip collections
Penguin India "retro revival" reprints of the Modesty Blaise novels
Joseph Losey's film adaptation:
Tarantino-generated prequel My Name Is Modesty
A couple of the "extras" included in the DVD edition of "My Name Is Modesty" arguably are more interesting than the vidpic itself. A 52-minute interview with Peter O'Donnell may seem plodding to the uninitiated, but the author's anecdotes likely will enthrall diehard fans of Modesty Blaise. A 42-minute joint interview with Tarantino (billed as the vidpic's "presenter") and [director Scott] Spiegel are instructive mini-seminar on the nuts and bolts of low-budget vidpic production. That's a Modesty Blaise graphic novel John Travolta's character is reading in "Pulp Fiction." And Tarantino indicates he would like to eventually direct a lavish feature showcasing Modesty.Sparks' tune "Modesty Plays", dis-used TV movie theme song, re-titled but not re-recorded.
“I just want to thank you and congratulate you for writing the Modesty Blaise books,” the novelist Kingsley Amis once wrote in a handwritten note to Mr. O’Donnell. “They are endlessly fascinating. I read them for the second time recently when laid low by a very depressing bout of flu, and I’m sure they did quite as much as the doctor did to put me on my feet again.”
Muffy discovers....
Muffy St. Bernard -- all those who love America should pore over the New Yorker archives as he does -- has discovered the priceless advertising of Cleon Throckmorton, an architect, set designer, and commercial artist who flourished for twenty-five years or so beginning in the late twenties. Irony and indirection this profound deserves fame. The Hungry Ghost blog is doing its bit.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Nabokov as St. John's College tutor
"Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge."--from "Good Readers and Good Writers" (1948)," re-printed as the preface to Lectures on Literature (1980)
Friday, May 7, 2010
The blu-ray player as engine of change
By way of Godard, Richard Brody provides a high tech expansion of an idea of Chesterton's, beginning here with a very surprising opinion:
Word just in that Criterion is planning a Blu-Ray release of “The Darjeeling Limited.” It’s cause for rejoicing; the contemporary director whose attention to detail most repays macroscopic viewing of his films is Wes Anderson. Now I just have to get a Blu-Ray player; and to make it worthwhile, I’ll need a TV good enough and big enough for its heightened resolution to register; and to make room for that television, I’ll need a bigger apartment; and to do that… Thus is art an engine of change.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Faulkner for the defense
I came across this yesterday -- it's a short note that Faulker put at the beginning of the last part of the three volume work recently published as "Snopes", but originally published as "The Hamlet", "The Town", and "The Mansion". Its eloquence, I think, trumps Nabokov's bile.
This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life’s work is a part of a living literature, and since “living” is motion, and “motion” is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is un-motion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
What was your first?
Saw this suggested by the econ. blogger Megan McArdle, whose concerns are usually beyond the scope of the Hungry Ghost Blog:
Next time you're on Amazon, check back through your orders and look up the first book you ever ordered.... Surprised?
My first order (in the fall of 1997) was for two books: The Evelyn Waugh/Nancy Mitford letters and the first volume of Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond chronicles.....
Surprised?
Monday, May 3, 2010
Anticipation...
From this morning's Guardian Dr. Who blog:
I'm just going to come right out and say it. Flesh and Stone can lay credible claim to being the greatest episode of Doctor Who there has ever been. That's better than Genesis Of The Daleks and better than City Of Death and better than Tomb Of The Cybermen and, yes, better than Blink. It's just ridiculously good – so much that there's scarcely any point in picking out moments because there was an iconic sequence every couple of seconds.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Nabokov: The case for the prosecution
Even though I like Kate Atkinson a lot, I respond with unfeigned pleasure to the following astringent statements from a couple of interviews with Nabokov, reprinted in the wonderful "Strong Opinions", which, for only $12.00 plus postage, should make you very happy. At any rate, the roots of Tulkinghornism are not hard to find.....
Q: One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your experience?
A: I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth. (p. 69)
.......
Q. E.M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this every been a problem for you or are you in complete command?
A: My knowledge of Mr Forster's works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves. (p. 95)
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