Mary Magdalene

On the one hand, I found Mary Magdalene often slow and sometimes boring, and found myself thinking at several points during it that I was grateful for the presence of Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix, two always compelling and deep actors who bring a lot to their roles here. Plus there were pivotal moments when the Very Grave Dialogue (or, indeed, Monologue) required to be delivered by one or the other of Mary Magadalene and the rabbi Jesus was either just way too ponderous or compromised by weird fleeting contemporary-sounding half-inflections (Scylla and Charybdis, no doubt), and - more of a quibble but still - the underwater imagery didn't really do it for me.

On the other hand, it's undeniably serious - in every sense - in its treatment of the subject matter. And one of its real strengths is the way it handles its feminism - which in this case is also aimed more generally at structural and institutional power and silencing ... the scenes in the early part of the film in Magdala were powerful in showing Mary's lack of autonomy over her own person, and echoed later in how the apostles, especially Peter, interpret Jesus's message. Also, the cinematography and direction are impressively disciplined, and quite beautiful in a way that serves the rest of what's going on without distracting from it (also, Johann Johannsson's score is quiet and effective).

Neither good nor bad as such, but there was also a Gothic streak to it which I found interesting, and which did improve it for me.

In the end, what tips me towards liking it more than being indifferent towards it was that there were times, just a few and fleeting but still, where the film captured that sense that we are subject to deeper forces which impel us - not necessarily God-driven or faith-based, but particularly powerful in this context. That, plus its serious-mindedness and commitment to its purpose (and, especially, Mara's performance at the centre of it), make Mary Magdalene worthwhile for mine.

(w/ Sheila)

Lady Bird

Oh boy, just as good on a second pass, and maybe even more affecting.

And, in the way of things on a rewatching, I could appreciate even more the craft that went into it, and how tightly it's put together and the artistry of its naturalistic, loose feeling, especially having since read this and this.

Gorgeous.

(first time)

(w/ trang)

James Wood - How Fiction Works

A pleasure to read, with a lot to chew on, including much - in very sophisticated vein - on the conventions of good literary 'realism' that are worth being aware of for many reasons, as both reader and writer, not least in order to be thoughtful about the extent to which I should aim to follow them, and some of the implications of seeking other answers to the problems those conventions have developed to address.

It's tempting to quote whole long passages, but instead I've bought my own copy to mark and no doubt re-read (I've already read it twice through). Sections that especially caught my attention below.

* * *

[W]hen I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I am talking about detail I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my enquiries. (3)

Narrating

As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking ... this is called free indirect style [or] 'close third person' ... (8-9)

[T]he novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world - the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging. ... the language of the world ... has invaded our subjectivity. (28-9)

Flaubert and Modern Narrative

Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible.We hardly remark of good prose that it favours the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. (32)

Flaubert perfected a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of habitual detail with dynamic detail. Obviously, in that Paris street, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the newspapers lying on the table. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously. The effect is lifelike - in a beautifully artificial way. Flaubert manages to suggest that these details are somehow at once important and unimportant: important because they have been noticed by him and put down on paper, and unimportant because they are all jumbled together, seen as if out of the corner of the eye; they seem to come as us 'like life'. (34)

Flaubert and the Rise of the Flâneur

[In Flaubertian realism] The tension between the style of the author and the style of the character disappears because literary style itself is made to disappear. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us ... in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time-signatures. ... The artifice lies in the selection of detail. (46-7)

Detail

How would we know when a detail seems really true? ... [Thisness:] any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centres our attention with its concretion. (54)

[F]ictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself. In other words, the category of the irrelevant or inexplicable exists in life ... [Life] will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. ... [in realism] the margin of surplus itself feels like life ... (68, 69)

Character

[T]he vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character's actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character 'Isabel Archer', even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here. (98)

[In character] It is subtlety that matters - subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure - and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. (99)

A Brief History of Consciousness

The novel has changed the art of characterisation partly by changing who a character is being seen by. ... in Raskolnikov's story the audience - the reader - is invisible but all-seeing; so the reader has replaced David's God and Macbeth's audience. ... the novel becomes the great analyst of unconscious motive, since the character is released from having to voice his motives: the reader becomes the hermeneut, looking between the lines for the actual motive. (108, 112, 113)

Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. ... The third, and bottom layer of motive is beyond explanation and can only be understood religiously. These characters act like this because they want to be known ... (122)

Sympathy and Complexity

Since Plato and Aristotle, fictional and dramatic narrative has provoked two large, recurring discussions: one is centred around the question of mimesis and the real (what should fiction represent?); and the other around the question of sympathy, and how fictional narrative exercises it. Gradually, these two recurrent discussions merge ... (130)

Language

One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. ... rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. ... We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one, unvarying register [but] this is a social convention ... (148)

... the style of the sentence [should] incarnate the meaning ... (151)

Metaphor which is 'successful' in a poetic sense but which is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor - the kind of metaphor which this particular character or community would produce - is one way of resolving the tension between author and character, as we saw when discussing the 'leggy thing' of the nutcracker in Pnin. ... metaphor [can be] not explicitly tied to a character. It issues forth in third-person narration. So it seems to be produced by the stylish, metaphor-making author, but it also hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character's world. (159, 160)

Dialogue

Truth, Convention, Realism

[T]he reigning assumptions. Realism is a 'genre' (rather than, say, a central impulse in fiction-making); it is taken to be mere dead convention, and to be related to a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings; it deals in 'round' characters, but softly and piously ('conventional humanisms'); it assumes that the world can be described, with a naively stable link between word and referent ... and all this will tend toward a conservative or even oppressive politics ... This is more or less nonsense. (169)

The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent story-telling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert ... writing of this sort has indeed become a kind of invisible rule-book, whereby we no longer notice its artificialities. ... Decomposition like this happens to any long-lived and successful style, [so the] task is then to search for the irreducible, the superfluous, the margin of gratuity, the element in a style which cannot be easily reproduced and reduced. (174, 175-6)

The point to make about convention is not that it is untruthful per se, but that it has a way of becoming, by repetition, steadily more and more conventional. (178)

[Brigid Lowe] proposes that we restore the Greek rhetorical term hypotyposis, which means to put something before our eyes, to bring it alive for us. (179)

[L]et us replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth' ... (180)

George Eliot: 'Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowman beyond the bounds of our personal lot.' ... art is not life itself, art is always an artifice, is always mimesis - but art is the nearest thing to life. (181)

[W]e are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life - the desire to produce art that accurately sees 'the way things are' - as a universal literary motive and project, the broad central language of the novel and drama ... the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional. (183-4, 186-7)

CD collection - the end

Mid last year, I started breaking up my cd collection (here and here) but held on to what's basically my personal canon - a last 200 or so. But it's time for those, too, to go out the door, so here they are (plus chart generated from somewhat detailed spreadsheet in which they've also been recorded ... 1998 was the year, evidently, in so many ways).

The Rolling Stones - Hot Rocks 1964-1971

It was "Sympathy for the Devil" that did it, heard recently in a movie I think, putting them back into my mind beyond my everlasting love for "Paint It Black" and, from childhood and teen radio background, familiarity-unfortunately-to-the-verge-of-contempt with most of their other big songs. This is a best-of covering their golden years so of course it's great.

I'd heard all of these before, but the discoveries, such as they are - songs that I only vaguely knew, maybe wouldn't have been able to identify them by now, and now know are (a) by the Rolling Stones and (b) great - are "Play With Fire", "Ruby Tuesday", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Gimme Shelter".

Another discovery: many of their songs that I hadn't heard before sound kind of like the Kinks.

Pacific Rim Uprising

I suspect this was partly incidental to the film itself, in that any similar film might have affected me similarly this afternoon, but after watching Pacific Rim Uprising it actually seemed like I could feel my brain working differently (that old snobbish, but not wholly wrong, charge that Hollywood can make you less intelligent). Anyway, I was fond enough of the original Pacific Rim to watch it not once but twice, and while this one's colourful and bright enough, it's not as good.

Samanta Schweblin - Fever Dream

I caught up on this year's Tournament of Books a few days ago, including the intriguing notices that Fever Dream was getting as it made its run (as of today, having just won its semi-final bracket), and got it from the library today and finished it over the course of the afternoon. It's a very short novel, novella length in fact, but the main reason I read it so quickly was that I couldn't stay away from it, despite trying two or three times to put it down and do something else - it's intensely mysterious and dread-inducing, with a strong 'and then what happened?' (which is actually a 'so what's already happened, and what's really going on?') pull, which is reinforced by David's constant warnings that time is short.

Much of the book's unsettling effect arises from its oscillation between plausibly reality-based details and explanations (the suggestions of a toxin in the water supply, Amanda's convincing maternal feelings for Nina, the way Carla often acts entirely like a normal person would in her position, the handful of situational hints that ground Amanda and David's dialogue) and elements which seem to surpass rational explanation and operate in the realm of the unknowable (the happenings in the green house, everything about worms, the uncanny happenings with the children, the underlying causes and logic for what happens and what is important to Amanda's plight), without ever really resolving the dialectic between the two. There are also startling moments of out and out creepiness - especially Amanda's dream about Nina and her mouth.

In the end, there remains something cryptic and unexplained about Fever Dream, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying. I wonder whether this one will linger. I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

"Thinking with Hands - Linda Tegg: A Work in Progress" (Melbourne School of Geography)

Quite enjoyable series of short talks by artist Linda Tegg (who has just completed a year as the 'artist in residence' at the School of Geography at Melbourne Uni, in association with the Potter) and various others from the School and the Potter responding to her work. I didn't engage that much with the art (evening seminar format) but liked "Punchbowl", a 2 minute looping video of some men fishing while a nearly invisible 'absent' figure displaces space around them, including because of Tegg's comment that after a while the rocks began to look like a stage, the ocean like a film set.

(w/ Sara)

Shaun Prescott - The Town

What a very interesting, and very good, novel. Actually, I didn't expect to enjoy it and started reading quite ready to abandon it partway through if it didn't grab me - the bits and pieces I'd read about the book had given me a sense of its high concept (unnamed narrator in an unnamed town where not much happens and absurdity is plentiful and unremarked-upon) and I found it hard to imagine how that could hold my interest over an entire novel. Yet somehow it does, in sentence after sentence of exemplarily plain description and observation, section after section of things not happening, or happening and seeming to indicate something significant but without being treated at all that way, with the barest of through-lines both plot and character-wise.

To me it felt haunted by Borges, Kafka, Calvino (specifically Invisible Cities) and Camus; at the same time Michel's Patisseries, Woolworths, Big W and other stalwarts of (mundane, consumerist) Australian life are integral to its fabric, not to mention pubs, insularity, excessive drinking, McDonald's value meals, and the prospect of being bashed for no reason by a guy called Steve. It sustains its curious register the whole time, and is remarkably easy to read, given the lack of conventional hooks it offers. And of course there are those holes. Great stuff.

A Fantastic Woman

Summary thoughts:

1. It made me identify - at least to the extent possible via watching a film - with Marina, a trans woman, and specifically the constant sense of threat and anxiety she faces, but also the love and loss she feels in relation to her partner. It felt truthful to me, but then what do I know?
2. Re: the above, I'd like to know how the film has been received by members of the trans community. In general, and including the sauna scene.
3. The plotting is a bit stumbly and I'm not really convinced by the various fantasy elements (although the final appearance of Orlando's spectre does pay off).
4. The treatment of grief doesn't rise above the generic, although it's well enough done, and admittedly the situation is not standard, given the number of obstacles and additional emotional hardships she faces in the process.
5. Despite the several reservations above, I'm very glad I saw it, if for no other reason than that it's a story and experience that isn't mine but which should be represented more, and I did think it was sensitively done.

(w/ Hayley)

Kasey Chambers - Dragonfly

I was listening to Carnival the other day and it reminded me how much I like Kasey Chambers, so I thought I should catch up on her a bit, and her latest was this double album that came out last year.

It seems like she's gone on with it; she's still good, and these days grittier and a bit wider-ranging (though she was always eclectic) in her rootsiness. There are a bunch of good songs on this set, and three burn-the-house-down excellent ones in "Ain't No Little Girl", "Summer Pillow" and "You Ain't Worth Suffering For", the two with 'ain't' in the title both bluesy rockers, and the other more of a country-pop anthem (although the pop element is of the Sia kind), strings and all.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti

I'm not sure, but I don't think I ever got to Physical Graffiti back in the days when I listened to Led Zeppelin. Anyway, it is immense. With more distance from the rock music that dominated my own formative years (which I still, of course, love), it's easier to hear how powerful and great Led Zeppelin were, laying this stuff down before I was born. This is the one with "Kashmir", and a terrific opening one-two of "Custard Pie" and "The Rover" besides.

"Janet Laurence: What Colour is the Sacred?" (Arc One)

Very attractive double-surface mirrored prints and colour installation boxes!

Annihilation

This could have been weirder still and I wouldn't have minded, but even as it is, Annihilation doesn't do badly on that front. For the most part, the threat feels more visceral and bodily (and perhaps psychological) than, as it is in the book, holistically mental and existential, but it comes through powerfully, and the various dangers of the party's journey into the Shimmer (and to the Lighthouse) are all convincing.

As does any film in this terrain, it brought Monsters to mind for me, although it's considerably wilder and more spectacular (and speculative). Also, it almost goes without saying, both Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh excellent; also terrific is Oscar Isaac, and indeed I enjoyed all of the other principals too (Tessa Thompson's physicist, Gina Rodriguez's paramedic and Tuva Novotny's geomorphologist).

Zadie Smith - Swing Time

First things first - I finished Swing Time last night and spent a few minutes browsing for worthwhile takes on it, and came across this passage (here), which is delightful in how it captures my own feelings about Zadie Smith (most recently attempted here).

There is also a sense that we must protect her: we feel her anxiety in her movement among styles, and we sense that she is trying to say the right good thing, and as she holds out her hand, we grip it and carry her on. I am invested in Zadie’s story, susceptible to the Bildung in all this: White Teeth came out the year I went up to Oxford, and became a symbol of all that a nerdy girl from a state school might do under meritocracy; The Autograph Man was given to me by my mother when I was on my year abroad in Paris, and reminded me of the importance of going beyond oneself even at the price of failure; On Beauty appeared the year I came to London and began working for the LRB, and I bought it in hardback and discussed it at a book group and even stole a placard of its very pretty cover from a Booker Prize party I snuck into; NW I read in a proof passed around the LRB office, and I tried out my thoughts on her experimental turn with colleagues in the same tentative way that she played with numbered paragraphs and their juxtaposition. This is just my story, but others of my generation have similar ones, and it’s a problem: we want her to pay back our emotional investment. With each new novel, the hope rises: is this finally the great book that was always coming?

And Swing Time itself? Well, it's (still) not her great novel and indeed is a notch below NW I think, though it has many merits. It's in the first person, very controlled, many commas, no strong sense of the narrator's personality (which is partly the point - she is always in the shadow of others). Smith's craft as a writer only gets better each time at the plate, and her restlessness in continuing to seek out new formal ways of exploring the ideas that have been with her from the beginning - identity, race, connection, meaning, humanity, the stories we tell to become ourselves - is wonderful. Yet, still, I didn't feel fully taken hold of, shaken, by Swing Time. It is fine, very fine even, but that fire within really great fiction, it's not there.

Let the Sunshine In

A quite marvellous 100 minutes of Juliette Binoche having romantic entanglements with a series of unsuitable men, as directed by Claire Denis. I enjoyed the film's frankness about sex, desire, personality (and character), and the banality of miscommunication, and the hints of the metaphysical dotted throughout, especially in the final scene with Gerard Depardieu.

(w/ Sheila and Ash - part of FFF)

New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus

The first time I started reading New American Stories, which I'm pretty sure was more than a year ago, I got about halfway through before being distracted by one thing and another; when I came back to it I decided to start again from the beginning. Which means I've been reading this tome, on and off, for quite some while now, and also that I've read quite a lot of its stories more than once.

Actually, there's a sense in which that was always going to be true, regardless, because what's become clear while reading it is how much of a node the anthology is, planted indeed at the intersection of a lot of what's going on with American short stories today, as well as my own tastes. After all, I picked it up because, amongst its 32 entries, it includes stories by my two reigning favourite short story writers, Rebecca Lee ("Slatland", which isn't one of my favourites of hers but is possibly the most impressively weird thing in the remarkable Bobcat) and Rivka Galchen ("The Lost Order", which is one of my favourites, and maybe the most perfect story in the all round confounding American Innovations).

And, while working through it, I separately came across a couple of others which stunned me when I read them online, before later discovering them also tucked away in the back half of NAS: Rachel B Glaser's hypnotically brilliant and staggeringly unusual "Pee On Water" and Deb Olin Unferth's "Wait Till You See Me Dance", which works the short story magic of seeming to spin off-centre while pulsing forward the whole way through, and ending with an emotional burst that carries its own hard, unforgiving truth inside it.

Plus there was George Saunders's "Home", which I didn't think I liked that much the first time I read it, found had worked its way, from that odd opening line onwards ("Like in the old days, I came out of the dry creek behind the house and did my little tap on the kitchen window."), inside me by my second pass, and then totally bowled me over through repeated reads in Tenth of December.

I was already familiar with many of the other authors, to greater and lesser extents, in some cases from the way, way back (Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo), and in others more recently: Joy Williams, whose "The Country" in NAS is as powerfully metaphysical as any contemporary short story could be, Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories I've been discovering with huge enjoyment over the last few months, represented by the not-a-word-wasted "Men", Kelly Link, Donald Antrim.

Of course there were new discoveries, too; interestingly, the three that stand out are all laced with a dark, squalling humour: Sam Lipsyte's "This Appointment Occurs in the Past", Rebecca Curtis's "The Toast" and Charles Yu's "Standard Loneliness Package", which made me laugh out loud not once but twice on public transport with descriptions that are packed with an existential depth charge of emotion:

I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty people. It's a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of space. Some kind of infinite foot. And it's stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.

The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn't hurt, exactly. It's not what I would call comfortable, but it's not pain, either. More like pressure. Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling I call the infinite foot - to him it felt more like a knee - is actually the American experience of the Christian God.

It's only now, typing that out, that I've made the obvious connection to Orwell's vision of the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever. It doesn't matter. Maybe it makes it better.

Laura Marling - Short Movie

Another one. So many good songs; special mention for the Johnny Marr-ish guitars and loping melody, lyrics delivered by Marling with one eyebrow raised throughout, on "Gurdjieff's Daughter". (Most recently - A Creature I Don't Know.)

A Pacifist's Guide to the War on Cancer (Malthouse)

I didn't know anything about this one except that the company behind it, Complicité, did last year's The Encounter, so I was unprepared for what a journey it turned out to be, the meta-theatrical elements which are put in the foreground from the start by writer/performer Bryony Kimmings paying off spectacularly over the work's latter stages, as the 'guide' she thought she was writing is shaped by her own experiences (especially her newborn son's illness) and the relationship she forms with Lara Veitch along the way, and the seeds planted earlier - the experiences of Bryony herself being prominent, the kingdom of the unwell being like a forest, the breaking down of the fourth wall - blossom with real dramatic and emotional force. I haven't seen anything quite like it, and nor have I seen so many tears in a theatre audience ever before.

(w/ Cass)

NGV Triennial (third visit)

A quick visit today - just an hour or so. MVP was Candice Breitz's "Love Story" (2016) - previously retitled "Wilson Must Go", I think, but it's more recently been announced that Wilson is, indeed, gone (as in, no longer the NGV's security services provider).

In the first room, Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin performing extracts from the much longer (three to four hour) accounts, given direct to camera, by six asylum seekers (which appear in the following room): "Sarah Mardini, who escaped war-torn Syria; Jose Maria Joao, a former child soldier from Angola; Mamy Maloba Langa, a survivor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Shabeena Saveri, an Indian transgender activist; Luis Nava Molero, a political dissident from Venezuela; and Farah Abdi Mohamed, a young atheist from Somalia". Wonderful piece of art, reminded me of the importance of hearing people's stories, and of course who gets to tell them.

Breitz is also the artist who did the Madonna (and, I think, Michael Jackson, and maybe others?) singing videos. I like her style.

(first visit; second visit)

Matthew Reilly - The Four Legendary Kingdoms

I've been curious to read one of these for a while, and now I know; the fast pace I expected, the diagrams to make the action easier to visualise and the galactic stakes I didn't! By good luck I chose one that has both of Reilly's main heroes, Jack West Jr and Shane 'Scarecrow' Schofield.

Two is a Family

Fairly charming, but the plot mechanics creaked all too evidently. Also, I didn't like the reliance on stereotype with the gay benefactor (the campness is fine, the lasciviousness considerably less so).

(w/ Erandathie - part of FFF, and selected because the aim was something uplifting and the Nova offerings in that respect were slim!)

Lally Katz - Atlantis

BELLA'S DAUGHTER: The painful and futile grip of desire.
ELECTRA: What do you mean by that?
BELLA'S DAUGHTER: Just something that used to come into my head when I'd hear my mom talking to her clients.

I thought it'd be interesting to read Atlantis on the page after seeing it performed late last year.

Lady Bird

I reckon this one's my favourite film that I've seen in quite a while, probably at least since A Ghost Story or even Personal Shopper, neither of which it has particularly much in common with. It reminded me why I've always sought out films that affect me emotionally, and it manages that familiar, but always still remarkable, trick of evoking both sadness and lightness, optimism and kindness in a sideways kind of way which gives it, in the end, a quality of truthfulness about life. I wouldn't say I went in feeling particularly susceptible but there were not one but two scenes which made me a touch teary (Lady Bird and her ex-boyfriend Danny out back of the cafe; her mum driving alone to the airport).

There's a specificity to its scope (the life of 17-going-on-18 Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson in early 2000s Sacramento) and a universality of experience, with those two in fruitful conversation with each other. (I guess there was something similar going on in Frances Ha.) I liked that it takes the time to invest nearly all of its characters with emotional depth, complexity and back story, including some I wouldn't have expected, and I found the relationship between mother and daughter in particular very moving. Just lovely.

(w/ Hayley)

Ty Segall - Ty Segall (2017)

A melange of modern rock, glam, punk, the occasional Beatles-esque moment, and even a bit of prog. Doesn't do much for me.

Gillian Welch - Boots No.1: The Official Revival Bootleg

These earlier and alternate versions of the songs that made it on to Revival, plus a few similarly unpolished (but not that far off from studio/release-ready, given how plain the actual record is) other songs, is a lovely listen, so it's a mark of the original album's greatness that its biggest effect on me has been to remind me how completely great Revival itself is.

The Children (MTC; Lucy Kirkwood)

The Children is an interesting play, taking place in an unusual register which left me waiting the whole time for it to break into outright surrealism even though it never quite did - mid-play dance sequence interrupted by flood of, erm, brown toilet water notwithstanding - until maybe the end (yoga, waves, the sound of bells underwater). The conversational rhythms are just a touch off, the humour is somehow destabilising, and the mystery around Rose's (Sarah Peirse - terrific) motivations adds to the on-edge feeling, and the plot introduces, then eludes, some very conventional matter (especially the affair between Rose and Robin - William Zappa, just a bit stagey for me) on its way to a much more interesting treatment of generational wants, entitlement and responsibilities.

Having said that, this was one of those that I ended, maybe unfairly, feeling the play as written was maybe stronger than this production (despite a strong, truthful-feeling performance from Pamela Rabe as Hazel and a simple but good set and lighting etc). I couldn't put my finger on what was just a touch off; maybe, in this case, the 'failing' might have been in my own sensitivity, in needing to do more to meet this impressive play on its own terms.

(w/ Cass)

John Allison - Bad Machinery: The Case of the Team Spirit

I have fond memories of Scary Go Round from my (I think) relatively brief but quite intense webcomic-reading days - maybe not that brief, as it looks like it was from at least December '05 to June '06 - and the creator went on to create this follow-up/spin-off series "Bad Machinery". Six kids, detecting. Colourful and sharp, with that quixotic dialogue I remember and love, and unabashed supernatural elements; v.g. (I've also since read the next couple of cases - they are all online.)

"oops" (mix cd)

Julian said when he gave me this one that it was more 'fun' than his usual style and that is correct! And not just because of the (excellent) Charli XCX song ("Boys") nor even the "A Thousand Miles" (as in Vanessa Carlton) / "Back in Black" (as in AC/DC) harangue-y singing voice mashup that follows ("AC/VC" by Neil Cicierega); across XTC, Jane Siberry x2, the Hold Steady and Bob Dylan also x2 (and more), this mix cd hits its marks.

Sarah Blasko - Depth of Field

I've thought for a while that Sarah Blasko is right on the verge of greatness, since around I Awake I reckon, and this latest hasn't shifted me on that; if anything, it makes me feel she's inched even closer.

Depth of Field is a confident-feeling outing, musically outgoing (crisp, often brassy - at least by Blasko's understated standards - arrangements) and lyrically introspective (the words sung clearly and given room to breathe), and there isn't really a one song that stands out for me, though "A Shot" comes closest, and "Everybody Wants To Sin" is notable for the way it channels Goldfrapp (especially in the bridge), "Making It Up" for its anger, and several others for their extreme lusciousness of both sound and melody (e.g. "Savour It", "Read My Mind").

"Teju Cole: Blind Spot" (Wheeler Centre)

Terrific discussion between Cole and Anwen Crawford, who I previously knew only as a music writer (albeit a conspicuously good one). I haven't read Blind Spot cover to cover, but have dipped into its text-photo pairings so had some context. Some ideas from the discussion that struck me:

• Photography as halfway between writing and performance art
• Photography as inherently subjective and embodied, because it always presupposes a perspective from which the photo was taken and a person who took it - this also means that there is an inherent sympathy in the photographic relationship
• Photography very good at conveying a simple message which is why it dominates advertising; the question is how to also activate its depths
• Montage as an idea from cinema, e.g. Tarkovsky, putting two things that are not obviously related side by side, generating a psychological charge
• "Places retain traces of the things that happened in them" - the central conceit of this work and all of Cole's
• Five big themes running through Blind Spot: flight, blindness, walking, the Bible, the Illiad
• Plus another two: tourism, terrorism
• Angels as go-betweens, intermediaries, messengers; and so all who are stragglers, in intermediate zones, are in a sense angels
• When you have a camera, you go around the world looking for what's yours [this applies just as much to writing of course!]
• "What would it be like to be free in writing this?" [the question Cole asks himself, to guide his writing and photography; I'm not sure I've fully grasped what it means, but it feels possibly profound]

(w/ Hayley)

"Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism" (ACCA)

This one was worth seeing but I don't think it was one of ACCA's better exhibitions of recent times, even allowing that the themed ones are probably trickier to nail than the individual artist shows.

Linda Dement - "Feminist methodology machine" (2016)

I think the main problem for me was that 'feminism' is a huge topic and there wasn't any obvious coherence to this exhibition's take on it, although most of the pieces did reflect a reasonably critical engagement with feminism itself. The other thing, I have to say, is that I didn't think many of the individual works were particularly strong. (I wondered if this was a failure of understanding or sympathy on my part, but Cass had the same take.)

Sandra Hill - "Home-maker #9: The hairdresser" (2014)

One aspect that did interest me was the way the various works engaged with aesthetics and conventionally appealing presentation (imagery, colours etc) in conveying their messages - some drawing heavily on forms designed to draw in the viewer (with expectations then sometimes being subverted), others aggressively raw and unappealing to look at.

Clare Rae - untitled action for ACCA (2017)

My two favourites were a series of six of Clare Rae's 'actions', undertaken and photographed at ACCA itself - I really like the NGV ones and these are ace too - and Shevaun Wright's sobering "The rape contract", made up indeed of a several pages of 'rape contract' in very convincing legalese - apt given the power of the law/state in relation to rape and its victims - with invisible ink annotations from a victim's perspective that shows up under the torches accompanying the piece (for that one, 'favourite' probably isn't the word so much as 'most affecting').

Shevaun Wright - "The rape contract" (2016)

Also Linda Dement's three-screen video installation "Feminist methodology machine", which reminded me of Revolt. She Said, Revolt Again and the quasi-surtitles that blared on screens in the transitions between its scenes, and Sandra Hill's simple but piercing 'hairdresser' collage-referencing painting.

(w/ Cass)

Ismael's Ghosts

A couple of days on and I still haven't made up my mind about this one; in fact, trying to recall some of its details I find it slipping away from me.

I think the best things it has going for it are Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg and neither disappoints, even though the film's approach to Cotillard's Carlotta never settles, so that she veers between inscrutable and possibly malign apparition (when seen by others) and a more naturalistic, fleshed-out character (when given her own perspective).

In terms of what else is going on, maybe the problem is there's just too much of it. The core is, I guess, Ismael's haunting by his multiple ghosts (Carlotta, Ivan, others?), and the effects of the associated trauma and absences on him and those around him. And for patches, when it focuses properly on its characters, the film is really quite satisfying. But there are too many loose ends, of too many different types, which dilute the force it could otherwise have had - the headlong leaps into melodrama, the 'perspective in western art' interlude, the whole spy brother sub-plot (there's something interesting in the latter two bits about story telling and its relationship to haunting and loss but it's never properly developed, and the film's form - the sliced up segments - gets in the way more than it illuminates).

So not really a success, I don't think - although it certainly had some kind of effect which continues to niggle ... which isn't nothing.

(w/ Sheila - part of FFF)

Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know

I've hopscotched my way through Laura Marling's back catalogue (so far, I Speak Because I Can, Once I Was an Eagle and last year's Semper Femina) and there hasn't been a bad one yet, or even one that's been merely okay, and A Creature I Don't Know is filled with the interesting melodies and rhythms, distinctive perspective and occasional surprising directness that run through her others.

Her version of folk feels at once timeless and easily contemporary; she has this knack of seeming to be sauntering her way through a song, only for it to take a later turn that then seems like it was always inevitable, like the way "Salinas" turns and builds from about halfway through into something that feels almost like slowed-down classic rock and roll, or the extended swinging outro to "My Friends". 

Three stories from the past

For years I've carried around the memory of reading a story, which I was pretty sure was by Jeffrey Eugenides, in which artichokes were cooked. I couldn't remember anything else about it, and googling "jeffrey eugenides artichoke" didn't help,[*] so that was that, just one of many lacunae.

Then, the other day in Embiggen, I saw a familiar-looking book called Cowboys, Indians and Commuters: The Penguin Book of New American Voices, edited by Jay McInerney. I vaguely recalled having read it before and, looking at its contents page - it was published in 1994, when Sherman Alexie, Donna Tartt, Jennifer Egan, David Foster Wallace and Eugenides himself actually were indeed 'new' - I realised it was here that I'd read that story: "Capricious Gardens".

Tastes change over time. I've just checked extemporanea, just in case, and it turns out that previous time was in 2005,[**] and while the story struck me enough to comment on, I didn't particularly like it then - and likewise, to a lesser degree, for DFW's "Forever Overhead". Since then, both have grown in my mind without my actually re-reading them until now; that single blurry recollection of the artichokes, the vividly image of the teenage boy atop the diving board and the way he indeed embodies and faces towards all that is 'forever overhead'. Though it's funny - I did like "Capricious Gardens" this time round, but admiration rather than flat-out enjoyment was still my dominant response, especially at the way desire weaves its way through all four of the characters' plots. Go figure.

I also re-read the Donna Tartt story, "Sleepytown". It's odder than I realised at the time, told in a kind of floating past tense, and recounting a childhood lived through a codeine haze. It's too filled with a sense of compressed energy to feel like an outtake from a longer piece like a novel, while more expansive and looser-feeling than a typical short story in this kind of more or less realistic - if Gothic-tinged - vein. Reading it, I felt like something a bit wild and untethered was flickering below the surface. So, it's extremely good.

***

[*] This was before his short story collection came out last year, articles about which now point the way.
[**] And if I'd thought to check before, I could've found the story much sooner.