« October 2003 | Main | December 2003 »
A few additional items of note from this morning's rounds, too good to pass up:
* Terry Teachout offers up a link to find out which Edward Gorey book you are.
* Arts & Letters Daily links to the full text of Umberto Eco's recent lecture on the future of books.
* Emma's treating you to some ugly mug shots for the holidays.
* There's the usual grabbag of goodies here.
* Finally, Dana gives craziness a "Yay" vote (and mentions Paris, too).
| |
| |
Like the rest of my fellow bloggers, I'm outta here until Monday. In the meantime, at the risk of being thought incredibly hokey or earnest, perhaps you'll stop by the Los Angeles Mission and help them out as they plan their annual Thanksgiving dinner. I know any contributions will be appreciated.
We'll see you all on Monday. Safe holidays to you all, wish special wishes to all my new blogging buddies (you know who you are).
| |
| |
James Wood, sine qua non here at TEV, seems to be cautiously favorable about Vernon God Little. but says it doesn't add up in the end.
For every false note, though, there is a sentence perfectly plucked and placed, when the obviously literary is checked by a weirdness, a tilted originality, that leads it back not to the author but plausibly enough to Vernon. 'Her voice plays from deep in her throat, like a parrot's. You want to check her mouth for the little boxing-glove kind of tongue.' (How strange and alive is that 'boxing-glove tongue'! This has the lift and idiomatic leap of Augie March.) When Vernon goes on the run, the book enjoys a fresh dimension. Vernon waits for the Greyhound bus, which stops by the roadside with a 'Pschhsss': 'The door puffs open.' The boy watches the power lines go by: 'Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.' In Mexico, he is assailed by 'the hot, dishwashy dawn'.
But the highlight for laugh value are some digs taken at Booker panel chairman John Carey.
John Carey, a serious man except when he is writing literary journalism, chaired this year's jury, and announced that he was in favour of 'widening what might be looked on as the Booker's scope'. He and his judges had, he thought, a preference for 'books with a strong storyline, a strong plot, a compulsion to go on turning the pages'. The prejudice is unsurprising; one of the inevitabilities of having to read more than a hundred novels concertinaed over a summer is that novels without much plot tend to languish. Suddenly everything should be shorter, even Ian McEwan. More troubling was Professor Carey's opinion that Nick Hornby's How to Be Good is 'a very impressive novel of ideas', just the kind of thing the Booker should favour. Ah, that would explain the exclusion of Coetzee's novel of ideas, Elizabeth Costello - not up to the Hornby level. To be fair to him, the former Merton Professor is not slumming; he's bought the place and moved right in.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - there's no reviewer I'm happier to read.
| |
| |
The author of Francis, the Talking Mule is dead. (OK, gimme a break. It's the day before Thanksgiving, slow news day.)
| |
| |
Alane Salierno Mason, a senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company and founding editor of Words Without Borders, explains why our ignorance of the literature of other cultures is hurting us.
Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit in literature has become extreme. As Esther Allen, head of the translation committee of the writers' organization PEN, pointed out in a letter to the editor of Harper's Magazine last November, the number of books translated from foreign languages published annually in America, per capita, despite a thriving publishing industry putting out more than 100,000 books a year, is comparable to the number published in the proverbially closed and undemocratic Arab world, where the publishing infrastructure is much smaller and weaker.Thus does the United States' vigorous export and minimal import of cultural products seem to mirror a political climate in which America seems to do far more talking than listening to anyone.
| |
| |
... the San Francisco Comical obliges, favorably:
The book also explodes the myth that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" came out of nowhere. Some of the best passages chronicle the young Garcia Marquez's insatiable appetite for reading matter of all kinds, from comic books to South American classics -- many of them unfamiliar to the American reader. These titles, of which ambitious readers may wish for a bibliography, make the old talk of "putting a continent on the literary map" at best a fatuous joke. Ably translated by Edith Grossman (and without recourse to what Garcia Marquez calls the "bankrupt habit" of converting adjectives to adverbs by simply adding a suffix), "Living to Tell the Tale" reveals the raw pigment that went into painting the author's masterpieces. On virtually every page, longtime readers will recognize an inspiration for one scene or another in Garcia Marquez's books.
My friends at the Literary Saloon will be pleased to note not a "Gabo" in sight. And special thanks to dear friend Yanina for my own belated birthday copy of same. One day, I'll find which box it's in and read it ...
| |
| |
Of all the Kenner memorial posts yesterday, I liked Sam's the best. I've ordered The Colder Eye on his say-so, which he assures me is money well spent.
| |
| |
It's not a joke headline. Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick and will be making a rare appearance on November 30 as part of the American Cinematheque's John Huston series.
Sunday, November 30 – 4:00 PMScreenwriter Ray Bradbury In Person!
MOBY DICK, 1956, MGM/UA, 116 min. Gregory Peck stars as Ahab in Huston’s heroic attempt to translate Herman Melville’s masterpiece to the screen (aided by a powerful adaptation by screenwriter Ray Bradbury.) Admittedly uneven, the film manages to capture the epic sweep and near-Biblical tone of the novel, and features an astonishing cameo by Orson Welles as Father Mapple. "MOBY DICK was the most difficult picture I ever made. I lost so many battles during it that I even began to suspect that my assistant director was plotting against me. Then I realized it was only God." – John Huston. Discussion following with screenwriter Ray Bradbury (schedule permitting).
Please be aware of the Hollywood Christmas Parade street closure on Nov. 30. Hollywood Boulevard will be closed, access theatre from the south and walk up Las Palmas.
| |
| |
The William Blake Archive has posted new updates on their site. If you haven't visited them, go have a look. It's a terrific, free repository (they call it a "hypermedia archive") that is probably the single richest Blake resource online. There are all sorts of goodies - biographical, contextual, a virtual tour of the archive. But my favorite part is the archive of illuminated materials. There's some wonderful stuff in there - I visited the Tate Gallery a few years ago when they hosted a comprehensive exhibition of Blake manuscripts. If you missed that one, this may be as close as you can get.
| |
| |
The Guardian reports that Dublin filmmaker Sean Walsh has made a movie of Ulysses.
Ten years ago, Sean Walsh, a young Dublin filmmaker, set out on an ambitious and improbable journey: to make a feature film of James Joyce's Ulysses. Despite countless setbacks, innumerable revisions (Walsh estimates he has read the novel 50 times and written 800 drafts of his screenplay) and widespread disbelief within the film community that he could ever make the film, this year he completed his project.Starring Stephen Rea as the mock-heroic everyman, Leopold Bloom, Angeline Ball, best remembered for her role as backup singer in The Commitments, as his carnal and cuckolding wife, Molly, and Hugh O'Conor, who starred in Chocolat, as the young artist-intellectual, Stephen Dedalus, Walsh's film, simply titled Bloom, has already generated intense debate in Ireland.
Scroll to the end for an amusing list of "Could these ever be movies?"
| |
| |
In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
