It’s Bele Chere weekend in Asheville. If you’re not familiar with it, Bele Chere is a giant street festival held each year in the last hazy days of July. Downtown is closed to traffic, and the citizens overtake the streets in sweaty, plodding hordes. Generally, you walk around, look at people, listen to music, eat, drink, and then stand in line at the Port-a-Potty.
If you live or work downtown it’s a fairly epic weekend. For every transcendent moment of sitting out on your fire escape, drinking margaritas & watching hundreds of strangers do the Electric Slide, there’s an offsetting low ebb, when it’s 4 am and packs of drunks are still roaming the streets howling for Lynyrd Skynyrd (it’s like they’re meta-drunk!).
This year I’m making a curtailed foray — tomorrow night we’re meeting my sister and her S.O. at the local brewers’ tent, then hopping up the street to hear the Goodies (recommended song: “Madame Devillia”). Report to follow Monday.

Here’s an idea for keeping customers, Netflix: The mail runs on Saturday, so should you.
Under the current model, Netflix processes movies Monday through Friday only. So if you mail a movie on Thursday or Friday, the company won’t mark it received until Monday, meaning you don’t get your next selection until Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. Which makes Blockbuster’s offer to let subscribers return movies in the store seem extra attractive: Who wants to wait a week for a new movie?*
However, if Netflix processed on Saturdays, that lag time would get cut. Mail a movie Thursday and you might get a new one as soon as Monday.
I love you, Netflix — who else would consent to send me Staying Alive so many times without ever once passing a word of stony judgment? So keep your lousy dollar decrease and ship Saturdays.
* That said, with its new policies (no late fees! we’ll mail to you!), Blockbuster reminds me of nothing so much as the boyfriend/girlfriend who treated you terribly but now wants you back, so s/he is talking sweet, but if you go back, you can be sure that s/he’s going to treat you terribly all over again. Just replace “took money from your purse for hookers”/”drained your bank account to pay for a prescription drug habit” with “charged exorbitant late fees.” Which is why I stick mostly to Netflix/Rosebud Video.

“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Terry wrote yesterday about the allure of handwritten letters. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about lately whenever shuffling out for the mail. The ratio of bills & junk mail to actual items of interest is currently running about 100:1 at our house, and some days that seems like a bleak signpost of … something (mortgages, lightning).
So I think about sending more letters and how nice it would be to receive some in return, particularly if these letters were to arrive in packages with gin, smokes, and the new Oxford Univ. Press edition of Coleridge’s Faust translation tied up in string. But as my friends who’ve received cards from me with messages like “Congratulations on your baby — and congratulations on his high-school graduation!” know, these impulses usually dissipate on the walk back from the curb.
This cycle (wanting mail, never sending mail) reminded me about the letters that appear in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, a book I take to the bed with about twice a year. The story features an incredibly old, bearded lady named Marian (a stand-in for Carrington) and her equally old best friend Carmella, who is bald and wears red wigs in a “queenly gesture to her long lost hair.” (Carmella is understood to be a stand-in for Carrington’s friend Remedios Varo.)
Here Carmella is introduced to the reader:

[Carmella] lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

Carmella’s letters are laced throughout the book, and she has a great flair. After the jump, one of her letters to strangers is described …
[Read more…]

There really is no shame quite like being 36 and having to confess as part of Monday morning status, “Sorry, that project isn’t complete, I was reading the new Harry Potter.”
All day yesterday I kept thinking, “One more chapter and then I will go to the desk and work.” Afternoon came and went, then dusk, nightfall, and finally the book was read, just around the time a party at my neighbor’s was breaking up.
Now I feel like a drunk having to account for time lost on a bender.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears here on Tuesdays. Sometimes I’ll make the list, sometimes the list will come from someone else.
A while back my friend Mark Sarvas shared some of the titles on his James Wood reading list, described as “essentially a list of books we’ve collected over the years that Wood has written about approvingly at one time or another.”
Reading this, I thought, “What a terribly geekish admission, Mark.” Then, “Would you please post the rest of the list?” Internerd, indeed. So in the spirit of reciprocity, here are five favorites from my own James Wood reading list (and if you haven’t read the Shchedrin yet, you really should correct that — it’s incredible):
1. The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin (translation by Natalie Duddington): Wood wrote the introduction to the New York Review of Books edition of the novel; you can download it here.
2. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul: Wood’s love for A House for Mr. Biswas is well-known; here he takes umbrage at the novel’s entry in The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII, declaring it “almost morally offensive.”
3. Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes: In “How Shakespeare’s ‘Irresponsbility’ Saved Coleridge” (The Irresponsible Self), Wood writes that Holmes’s two-volume biography of Coleridge “gives us the best portrait” of the poet.
4. Berryman’s Shakespeare by John Berryman (edited by John Haffenden): Wood quotes Berryman’s essays in “Shakespeare in Bloom” (The Broken Estate), and “Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling” (The Irresponsible Self).
5. God: A Biography by Jack Miles: In a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, Wood notes that “Bloom is enormously shadowed” by Miles, whose books he calls “Feuerbachian adventures.” (See also Wood’s review of Miles’s Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.)

Last week I wrote about Maugham’s The Magician, a gothic novel written early in the author’s career. Another unlikely dabbler in the form: Emerson.
From Robert Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire:

In writing, as in other endeavors, Emerson did not find his characteristic voice while at college, although some traits begin to emerge. In prose he was working on wildly diverse projects. One was a lurid gothic tale about a Norse prophetess and sibyl and her magician son. The fantasy is overheated and overwritten — more dream than anything else, a sort of Norse Vathek. The heroine Uilsa speaks:
“Did I not wake the mountains with my denouncing scream — calling vengeance from the north? Odin knew me and thundered. A thousand wolves ran down the mountain scared by the hideous lightning and baring the tooth to kill; they rushed after the cumbrous host. I saw when the pale faces glared back in terror as the black wolf pounced on his victim.”

Not a signal of agreement, just amusement:
• “Carl Sagan writes better than this.” — James Wood, exasperated by Don DeLillo’s use of the “inflationary mode” in Falling Man. (via Jenny Davidson.)
• “Hughes is a perfect example of what happens when a poet, though possessing none of the art necessary to turn a plain old messed-up life into literature, is the sun in her own Copernican system (she puts the Sol back in solipsism).” — William Logan on Frieda Hughes’ book of poems, Forty-Five.
• “I saw two casts, one led by Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg, the other by Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella. Murphy is not an actress. (When she’s happy, she dances with her mouth open; when she’s sad, she closes it.)” — Joan Acocella writing about the Peter Martins’ production of Romeo + Juliet.