Archives for 2007

Summer 2007 has been a season of nearly compulsive movie-going and video-watching. This year, books have taken a back seat. For one thing, I started commuting again for the first time in 14 years. It’s a train ride of ten to fifteen minutes merely, but it changes the texture of weekday life completely. The one plus is that I can read on the train, but the short spans of time don’t accommodate anything very demanding, only books I can slip into and out of with ease. So it’s been Reginald Hill mysteries for the most part, though I did manage to polish off “A Buyer’s Market,” the second novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, during the first two weeks of this brave new life. While I appreciate the newfound intervals for reading, truth be told, half the time I find myself more absorbed in the people around me and the scene outside the window. And once in a while I just want to close my eyes and extend last night’s sleep.
Instead of reading, I’ve been watching movies left and right, in the theater and in the living room. And the batting average has been high. Among revivals I was swept up in the glittering hauteur and proper passions of The Earrings of Madame de… and rolled with the punches, funny and bleak, that life in Watts deals to the hero of the gentle but unflinching Killer of Sheep. Some matches were made in heaven, or at least a planet or two away: a late spring viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris lent Danny Boyle’s ravishing Sunshine, seen only a few weeks ago, added layers of resonance. In both movies, the seductive visuals serve first to mitigate, then to heighten, the scariness of the something out there that means us harm.
But what of the blockbusters, you ask? Ratatouille afforded simple, easy enjoyment. Spider-Man 3 was batty, blockheaded fun–considerably more enjoyable for me, who had few expectations, than for my date, who was hopeful. Laughing at a movie can, I think, be as gratifying as laughing with one, and I totally cop to having had a great giddy time watching this franchise leave skid marks.
Once: did you see this movie yet? I don’t know of anyone who saw it who wasn’t taken with it. Modest and surprising and complicated, it left me unsure how I felt, in the best possible sense. The Departed on DVD was the opposite, manipulative to its core–right down to the soundtrack loaded with bait for personal nostalgia–and distractingly strewn with star power. The very premise of the script is a kind of stunt, let alone the casting. The last word on the Boston accents, of course, goes to the Cinetrix.
Today finds me shifting gears, as I have four hours to spend on an airplane to Seattle this afternoon. Believe me, I’m not the most comfortable, cool, calm, and collected flyer in the world, but I’ve always loved one thing about a plane flight: that there is no excuse not to read a book, nothing more productive I could possibly be doing with myself. (I know, I know–spoken like someone who hasn’t had to travel for business very much.) The question of the night, of course: what to read? Truly, four-hour travel stints come rarely enough in my life that this is no small dilemma. If I choose wrongly, the missed opportunity will rankle and when I’m back soon enough to my few stolen minutes with something slight. Next week I’ll let you know how I did.

“‘Be with you in a minute,’ said Moody. His face and body language clearly said, I am under pressure and that is the proper condition of mankind.”
Alan Plater, Oliver’s Travels

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from author Nicola Griffith, whose gripping novel Always is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
When I read I want to immerse myself in the word world: to taste it, hear it, feel it on my skin. I want the people and places and modes of thought to invade my mirror neurons–to persuade me, just for a while, that this narrative is my lived experience.
I grew up with the notion that ‘escapist’ reading was intellectually inferior to coolly analytical text, but now I’m on the side of Tolkien: those most likely to be upset by the notion of escape are the jailers. Now I’ll read anything, as long as it’s good, as long as it gives me that sense of multiplication, of time travel and life extension.
1. All Day Permanent Red by Christopher Logue. Poetic bricolage brimming with energy. With cinematic jump cuts and scene notes, Logue reimagines the first battle of the Iliad, renaming familiar characters and gleefully mixing imagery that’s historically accurate and wildly anachronistic (arrows carve tunnels through people’s necks the width of a lipstick, Idomeneo would ‘sign a five-war-contract on the nod’). As I read I felt dust gritting under my palms and blood in my mouth. An experience as startling as a flick in the eye.
2. The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (trans. in collaboration with Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s American partner). The physical embarrassments of age, memories of cold skin and hot fires of youth, the awfulness of no longer being able to hunt. With brilliant precision, Yourcenar delineates the physical and cultural environment’s influence on character. (For insight into Yourcenar’s life and work, see Joan Acocella’s lovely essay.)
3. A History of the English Church and People by Bede (for maximum culture shock, try the Plummar/Sherley-Price edition with its mind-bogglingly literal mid-twentieth century introduction). Here is an eighth-century English monk inventing the notion of cultural history in the short, snappy one- or two-page chapters I thought had been first used by twentieth-century bestsellers. Now I’m wriggling with excitment at the imminent arrival on my doorstep of a new complete translation of the 20-book The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, translated by Barney, Lewis, Beach, and Berghof. This was the Wikipedia of Bede’s time–his version of time travel. Want to know why architects used green Carystean marble to panel libraries, or whether amber is born of the sap of poplar or pine? Look no further.
4. The Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. The first book, Master and Commander, is essentially the opening chapter of a 20-volume novel set against the naval engagements of the Napoleonic wars. Jane Austen on a boat. Although the quality dims over the last five volumes, the first fifteen are faultless. I marvel at, to quote A.S. Byatt, O’Brian’s ‘prodigal specificity’, his humane touch, his humor and subtlety, the perfect balance of exuberance and restraint, his unerring eye for the exact word, the comic detail, and his ability to delineate changes in the friendship between two men with the same authority as volatile politics in South America or a brutal cutlass fight. I was utterly swept away by these books, and returned delighted and increased.
5.The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. A chapter in the history of a world that never was but should have been. As we travel with hobbits and dwarves we taste elven bread and good honest beer, smell the fumes of Orodruin and the existential rot of the marshes of Mordor. The book is stuffed with satisfactions: hobbit delight in a good snug hole in a sandy bank, dwarfish appreciation of a beautiful cavern, the soul-stirring gallop of the perfect horse. The film adaptation was enormous fun–at times even moving–but it lacked understanding of the Anglo-Saxon burdens of noblesse oblige and elegy which lie at the book’s heart. Journeying with Tolkien in print is stunning; when we get to the end and come back, home looks different.

“Only someone who sees other people as having intrinsic value can make friends. This does not mean that his friends will not be of instrumental value. But their instrumental value depends upon the refusal to pursue it. The use of friends is available only to those who do not seek it. Those who collect friends for utility’s sake are not collecting friends: they are manipulating people.”
Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged

After reading about it at Shaken & Stirred (see discussion in the comments), I’ve downloaded a free trial version of Scrivener, hailed (by someone somewhere) as ” the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.” So far I’ve only managed a single index card on the corkboard, but it’ll be fun to play more. I especially like how the software allows you a place to keep all the detritus — the stray thoughts and oblique parentheticals (“fear of abandonment, God”) — that gets sloughed off the main manuscript during editing. Up till now I’ve been sticking those in catch-all Word documents where they are never seen again. And who knows what gold is in those hills!
Meanwhile, over at Pinky’s Paperhaus, Carolyn asks a pertinent question: “Are [programs like Scrivener] truly organizational tools, or are they just software-based stalling tactics?”

This weekend’s New York Times Book Review featured Liesl Schillinger’s review of two new books by Tessa Hadley: a novel called The Master Bedroom and a collection of short stories entitled Sunstroke.
Schillinger writes, “Hadley is so good at miniature — at close focus on a small scene that could be missed if you didn’t look twice — that it’s almost frustrating to read her longer works.” I feel the same, except with the “almost.” Both Accidents at Home and Everything Will Be All Right branched off into multi-generational storylines, and as I read I kept wanting to lop off entire branches of story. As a rule, I’m a great fan of Middlemarchian sprawl, but here the “epic-ness” felt like dead weight: Like seeing a beautifully tailored dress with two sheets tacked onto its hem, trailing out behind. So while I look forward to reading The Master Bedroom, I’ll be reading Sunstroke first.
A few of Hadley’s stories that can be read online:
• “The Surrogate”
• “Sunstroke
• “The Swan”
• “A Mouthful of Cut Glass

I was saddened to learn of the death of Aura Estrada. A gifted writer, she was killed in a swimming accident on July 25 while on vacation in Mexico. A memorial website has been created, and it includes a collection of her writings as well as a remembrance, “Mi Aura,” written by her husband Francisco Goldman, which I urge you to read. Words Without Borders has also created a page in her memory that contains links to other tributes as well a couple of her essays available online.
I met Aura at a wedding last fall. She was the dear friend of dear friends and so I had heard a great deal about her before the meeting. She was exactly as she’d been described: Radiant and lovely, quickly intelligent and humorous. What I mostly remember about the wedding, though, is watching her and Frank dance; they themselves had been married only the year before, and their joy in each other was obvious. That weekend wasn’t enough time to get to know Aura well, only long enough to understand why her death is such a terrible loss to the many friends and family she leaves behind.

“‘Nothing makes sense.’
“‘Do you expect things to make sense?’ asked Oliver, in a spirit of sincere enquiry.
“‘Yes.’
“‘I’m not aware of any cure for that condition, Vice-Chancellor.'”
Alan Plater, Oliver’s Travels