Sunday, February 7, 2010
Birthdays
posted at 11:12 AM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
It's astonishing that Charles Dickens would be 200 years old today. (And that Jane Austen's first book was published 199 years ago, but it's not her birthday today so she's a subject for some other time.) One does rather hope for some kind of eternal consciousness, in general and personally, of course, but specifically so that people like Dickens know the hugeness of their impact and the many many generations of very different and changing people who have read and enjoyed their work. May we all be living in the best of times even if it occasionally feels like the worst of times - which he would say was appropriately balanced, I think - and may our houses not be bleak yet our expectations always great.

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Saturday, February 6, 2010
2-6
posted at 7:05 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Thanks to free wifi at a Borders bookstore, I spent the better part of the afternoon with a huge cappuchino and a bagel, doing work remotely on my (new and fantastic) netbook (thank you, Santa), headphones plugged in and listening to the opera streamed on WQXR, and switching off to exchange emails with friends and a relative getting ever-more inches of snow in Maryland (at last count it was over thirty inches, astonishingly); awesome afternoon.

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Friday, January 29, 2010
Books
posted at 12:57 PM | Permalink | 5 comment(s)
What is your considered opinion of - and what is your favorite book by -
J.D. Salinger
Louis Auchincloss
Robert B. Parker
?? I'm re-reviewing lists of their books and will add mine in comments, soon. And, she said wryly and with just a hint of petulance, I find it difficult to think that a kind and generous deity would pull all that energy from the world in one week but perhaps the pickings were getting slim wherever they all are. (Please, no hate mail - I'm trying to be vaguely amusing instead of saccharine or sentimental.)

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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
27
posted at 11:15 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Watched the first part of the new PBS "Emma" that was broadcast on Sunday and I have to say that I think it's pretty good, partly because Jonny Miller is refreshingly rude as Knightley (he's usually played too sticky sweet for my taste) and Romola Garai is charming and substantive as Emma (instead of flighty which is often how she's played) and the Los Angeles Times review - while written far more peppily than my note here - says essentially the same thing, I am happy to report.

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Looking for Will
posted at 9:08 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I'm loving In Search of Shakespeare which was originally broadcast on PBS in 2004 (can that be nearly six years ago??) but which was marketed so oddly that I avoided it like the plague. I'm quite enjoying its sense of excitement and fun due to the host/writer Michael Wood having such a good time exploring new documents and figuring out how WS got from the countryside to Lancaster to London…. I recommend it although you do have to put up with a few Shakespearean pompous academics now and then.

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Monday, January 25, 2010
Yarn blogging
posted at 9:51 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Yarn Harlot has posted her sixth anniversary essay - her posts are often more essays than posts and she's almost always interesting, intriguing, funny and provocative. I wish I could write like her. No wonder her blog morphed into several popular books and she's so popular that posts commonly garner 200-300 comments apiece.

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25
posted at 8:57 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I love doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, which I think I've mentioned before, and I don't want any criticism I ever make of it to suggest any diminishing of my enthusiasm which I'm mentioning because sometimes when I say critical things about things or people I like, some people think I'm saying that I actually do not like them which is very annoying since nuance doesn't seem impossible but apparently requires more nuanced awareness (heh) than I would have thought.

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Friday, January 22, 2010
No way
posted at 8:56 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
The New York Times will charge for "frequent users" (whatever that means) of their online paper, beginning in early 2011 (read about it here). Given the success (a/k/a failure) of their fee increases in the last few years, measured by the precipitous drop in sales, one wonders what the heck they're thinking. People such as myself want parts of the paper (arts, crosswords, sports, business) but not necessarily the whole paper and some of us have suggested charging for sections. They do offer the puzzles for an annual fee, now. Can you imagine paying forty or fifty dollars just to read it online? (Or is this just me?)

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Thursday, January 21, 2010
21
posted at 11:50 PM | Permalink | 4 comment(s)
I am amazed at how difficult it is to select the right words to convey the myriad of aspects of a personality and that leads me to pose a question to any rare readers (and myself): how would you describe yourself or someone you know well - accurately - with merely three words?

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Parker
posted at 2:04 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Good summary and compilation of tributes, here.

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Mystery books
posted at 1:46 PM | Permalink | 4 comment(s)
The focus of this coming weekend's bookstore visit is pretty much determined now as to what I need to peruse. No problem, since I like mystery stories' tidiness and the sense that you're engaged in a game of hide and go seek where the solution is hiding and you just have to find the right hiding place. Some mysteries are too gory for my apparently wimpy sensitivities, however, even on the printed page, and if events are too harrowing or heart-string-pulling, I cannot deal with it. But that being said, I find them satisfying and almost always more enjoyable than other genres. Here are this year's nominees:

Nominees for Best Novel
The Missing by Tim Gautreaux
The Odds by Kathleen George
The Last Child by John Hart
Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston
Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett
A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

Nominees for Best First (Mystery) Novel by an American Author
The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano
Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley
The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf
A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke
In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff

Nominees for Best Paperback Original (Mystery)
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott
Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano
The Lord God Bird by Russell Hill
Body Blows by Marc Strange
The Herring-Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler

Nominees for Best Critical/Biographical
Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James
The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives edited by Otto Penzler
Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret
Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent

The winners will be announced on April 29th at a banquet at the Grand Hyatt in NYC. Now *that* could be a fun evening.

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Love means never having to say.....
posted at 4:41 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Writers of novels, songs, screenplays and academic tomes all died this week. Three of them. Two men who moved and entertained millions of readers: Robert Parker yesterday and, on Sunday, Eric Segal, and a woman who wrote and sang lush music and poetry, Kate McGarrigle.

I wrote about Parker yesterday and will write more in the near future. He and his characters have been an influence and companions for me and several friends, for years.  Here's a nice piece on him by the proprietor of The Rap Sheet.

Segal, a scholarly classics professor at Yale, author of many books in his field and member of an Oxford college, was also the author of the monumentally popular Love Story and Oliver's Story and, surprising to me, screenwriter of the Beatles' The Yellow Submarine. One of his obituaries called him the progenitor of "bereavement fiction," something with which we are now entirely familiar. He had suffered from Parkinson's for years but refused to be bowed by it or anything else, evidently. At his funeral, his daughter, Francesca, paid him marvelous tribute by saying that "[at] the core of who he was [was] a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity."

Meanwhile, Kate McGarrigle, sister of Anna and one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, and mother of marvelous Rufus Wainwright, died earlier this week as well. She had learned to play the piano from nuns in the small Canadian town where she grew up. Her son's moving tribute is on his website.

A sad week.

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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Robert Parker
posted at 5:44 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
NO NO NO! It's wrong and it's years - decades - too early. Robert Parker died this morning. We have lost a friend, a companion, a correspondent, a truly joyous part of our world. How can there be no more get-togethers with Spenser, Susan and Hawk or Jesse or Sunny? And their friends and the people in their lives. It's just wrong. And so sad.

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Monday, January 18, 2010
Book <--> film
posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Just finished reading "Up in the Air" by Walter Kirn. It's a profoundly sad story with very little moments of charm or levity to break the unremittingness of the main character's ennui. The only good news is that he is making huge changes as the book ends but, on the other hand, disaster may be about to strike; I suppose it's a little like old-fashioned romantic comedies that leave it up to viewers/readers to decide if the ALmost reunited couple will get back together or be forever separated.

What puzzled me a great deal and sent me researching on the Internet was that one of my favorite reviewers, 5 Second Reviews, had indicated the movie had an interesting and absorbing storyline but one that didn't remotely sound like what took place in all the gazillion endless musings of the characters in the novel. (Did I mention that it's not only unremittingly miserable but also very very very very very very (sorry) long? or that it's all told as an inner monologue and that it's often nearly crushingly nasty and mean, and almost always tedious with only a few few exceptions?)

So I was relieved to read an interview with Walter Kirn himself (here) in which he says that the screenwriters and producers (and Clooney, one assumes) invented some new characters as well as quite substantively different story threads for the movie. Enough so that I kept wondering if there were two books because the one I was reading had only the airplanes and million-mile goal and his job and the tedium of his job in common. In the interview, Kirn says he liked it that Ryan was saved/revived by the moview and I guess I would feel the same about my gone but not forgotten fictional offspring, although why anyone saw chose to bring this miserable guy back to life is beyond me; I have to assume the movie Ryan Bingham is not anywhere near as miserable as his book counterpart. And maybe I'll even like the Reitman character a bit (it would be hard impossible to like him less).

But I'm hard pressed to figure out how it isn't copyright infringement, even with the author's agreement, to use a title and characters but utterly change activities and, in fact, the whole story line. I suppose one could argue that disenchantment and misery are the core point of both and, therefore, that nothing fundamental has really been altered; in that case, why not just recite Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" or any of Nietzsche's books over and over?

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Sunday, January 17, 2010
Haitian report
posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I recommend this blog - he's working with a mission that's been working with Haitian children for the last five years. Reading his hourly reports has the obvious impact of immediacy and is quite compelling.

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Thursday, January 7, 2010
7
posted at 11:10 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
I reluctantly watched a couple of Becker episodes nearly two years ago and have enjoyed it ever since despite having had a fairly intense aversion to it when it was originally broadcast (1998-2004) which either means that I have become more dyspeptic in the last decade - definitely a possibility - or that the gooeyness of many sitcoms and shows bores me - which it does - or that the unremittingly bitter sauciness of some modern so-called chick lit annoys me a lot - which it truly does - but mostly means that I like writing that exposes layers and nuances of personalities.

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Creativity
posted at 5:35 PM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
One of my favorite blog friends asked me a question that gave rise to my mentioning Thomas Aquinas's recommendation for some boundaries and restrictions in order - apparently contradictorily - to enhance creative expression. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I wanted to mention it in a "real" post in order (I hope) to elicit reactions from any passing-by readers.

The idea certainly seems contradictory. I have forgotten where the suggestion is, in Aquinas's writing, but the point is along the lines of utter freedom actually NOT being conducive to creativity and careful thought. I totally remember how I balked at the idea when I first read it but my philosophy teacher urged me to put it on a shelf for future consideration. And Aristotle concurred, as it turns out (not in person or time, of course), which was persuasive. Then I experienced it myself in some situations where I was limited by deadlines or having to use only two colors in a design or not discuss something specific in an essay. Lo and behold, heightened expressiveness seemed to result. Perhaps when you restrict one thing, you focus on something else and with more intensity. Perhaps that explains the dearth of great art from peaceful societies but the explosion of art from Communist Russia, for example, and the interesting (if not altogether brilliant) novel without using the letter e. Which is not to say that I'm recommending totalitarianism as a booster for artistic brilliance, duh.

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Sunday, January 3, 2010
Panache
posted at 8:12 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Splendid last word that Cyrano speaks: "panache."
Lush, luscious, witty, lovely and clever words with which the play abounds.

I don't know about you but I've read Cyrano at least twice and seen it and/or variations at least four or five times. Yet I would not have known what I was missing. Tonight the gods of the new year apparently were working for me because I happened upon the Kevin Kline / Jennifer Garner version on PBS's Great Performances. Fortuitously, my TiVo had recently recorded something on WMHT so when I turned on the tv a mere five minutes in and it was the irresistible scene where "nose" and "knows" and "noes" and all manner of other ways to say something with that sound are bandied about, with quizzical looks and guffaws everywhere, I was lured, unsuspecting, into a hundred and thirty minutes of the moving and sweet story that we more or less know. What was especially engaging and rewarding is discovering that Cyrano is far more robust and meaty than we may remember (or at least than I did). And Kline's performance is amazing. (I wonder what it's like to have those words come out of your own mouth and, in a way, thoughts, and convey them for an audience to understand and feel so much.)

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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
When writers write attack
posted at 5:24 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Indeed this is amusing and it's certainly understandable, and no doubt we would all want to do it, too. But it's a bit alarming and altogether unseemly and a bit unauthorly. Besides, I am willing to bet a fairly large gob of money that she cherishes - and would demand - her right to say what she thinks when the shoe opinion is on the other foot side.

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Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Nasty news reporting
posted at 4:48 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Occasionally one sees such a perfect example of the tabloidization of even major (dare I say mainstream) news reportge that it must be mentioned aloud. The headline of this article is so misrepresentative as to be utterly mind-boggling except that one knows the intent was to snag readers. It is not Sandra Bullock and her mate who have been in a custody dispute - it is her husband and his previous spouse. The headline, of course, is intended to make readers smack their lips and gather salaciously for a nice juicy tidbit about yet another film egotist. But no, not true. It is simply a sad, difficult situation about people who once loved each other, one presumes, and had children together. Not an opportunity for engaging in the twisted schadenfreude of enjoying the misfortunes of super successful celluloid stars. Shame on CNN.

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