Alison Lurie - Love & Friendship

I can be a boy of obscure whims; one such, of a little while ago, was the desire to be complimented on some item of my wardrobe (it didn't really matter much which item) so that I'd be able to reply, 'Oh, this old thing?'.

As I said, obscure.

Anyhow, this book reminded me of that passing thought, for its characters - middle-upper class university academics and their wives in a secluded New England university town, some time in the 1950s (as far as I could gather) - are just the sorts to utter such words. Take this passage, for example:

Feeling rebuked, Emmy removed herself. This time she went upstairs and began to straighten out Freddy's closet. All I have to do to keep Mrs Rabbage quiet is to insult her now and then, Emmy thought to herself, and she gave the kind of cheerful laugh that might be supposed to go with this kind of cheer, but she did not care for it. She was chagrined to think that she had spoken rudely to a servant.

Or this one:

'Hateful thing,' Miranda said, kicking the stove. 'And do you know, when we first moved in here I was completely enchanted with it. Oh, lord!' She snatched the coffee-pot up just as it boiled over. 'I'm so sorry. That just shows you. Do you still want some?'

One interesting thing about Lurie's writing - apparent in that first passage - is that she writes, self-consciously or otherwise, in much the same voice as that adopted by her characters ('but she did not care for it'). In part, this is because the narrative voice is almost exclusively that of one or the other of the characters (that is, it's presented as the thoughts of one of the characters - in conventional third person prose, though, rather than Joycean stream of consciousness), sometimes in the form of letters. There's an amusing little digression in there somewhere in which Holman reflects that Emmy's use of intensifiers ('perfectly horrid', 'terribly thoughtful', etc) actually indicates a diminution of feeling/opinion - I wonder whether that's an entirely fair appraisal, though (not that Lurie necessarily endorses Holton's p.o.v., etc, etc). Much use made of adverbs in general, sometimes as qualifiers ('rather delightful'). (These examples aren't actually from the book itself, but they might as well be.)

So, the milieu is academia (university lecturers and administrators; not students except at the margins) in a very particular time and place, mostly the humanities - not a microcosm for the rest of the world because, as one of the characters notes, all of the violence and irrationality has been abstracted (besides, most of the world doesn't make passing references to Keats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hobbes, classical mythology, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and so on in casual conversation), but still a fascinating study, at least for me.

Focuses on the little intrigues and maneuvers (both academic and personal), and the petty and major disasters (again, across both dimensions) of the town's inhabitants, tracking them through dinner parties, faculty meetings, clandestine encounters in parks, chance run-ins at supermarkets. Social dynamics strongly determined by class and other traditional indicia of social status, filtered through and inseparable from the university hierarchy. Cast of nouveau riches, frightfully well-bred old money types, 'picturesque' (Lurie's description not mine, and a good one) arty semi-bohemian types, drifting musicians, struggling young instructors, boorish/feared senior professors, inept and mildly corrupt administrators, and their wives (who are very much active subjects in their own right) and children. Much time spent on the merits and otherwise of the divisive 'Humanities C' course. In some faint way, put me in mind of The Great Gatsby. Often very amusing, albeit more in a 'wry smile' than 'laugh out loud' way.

All of which should be more than enough to explain why I like this book so much.

* * *

Something was wrong with the game, though. 'But they're all blindfolded!' Emmy objected.

'Yes,' Miranda said. 'They like it better that way.'

Alison Krauss + Union Station - New Favorite

All the accoutrements of this elegant modern bluegrass-styled music - most notably, Krauss's voice - taken together make for a really nice sound, guitar and Dobro more prominent than banjo, fiddle or mandolin. There's a pleasant airiness to proceedings (especially on songs like "The Lucky One" and "New Favorite", not coincidentally two which I already knew), with neither the 'mountain' nor 'melancholy' (obviously not opposed to each other) aspects of these stylings pushed too strongly, and the record hangs together well. Still, I haven't yet taken this one to heart - maybe that'll come with time, or maybe it's a function of my approaching it from the pop end of the spectrum rather than the bluegrass/folk. That said, I'm writing this after less than a day of repeat playing, and have probably spun it about a half dozen times already, liking it a tiny bit more each time, so who knows?

Minutiae: (1) Amusingly, I found it in the 'jazz' section at the library (and labelled as such); and (2) the title track was written by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

War of the Worlds

Of all the early sci-fi/adventure novels by Verne, Wells and co, a large number of which I seem to've read somewhere along the line between primary school and now, The War of the Worlds has always stood out, even though my memory of it is fairly vague. I saw one of the 1950s versions on video when quite young (I think there was a whole series, and I happened to watch the first one) and it left a strong impression - it was frightening. The book also left me quite uneasy, in part because of what I recall as being its somewhat distanced, clinical air of reportage (though I presumably didn't think about it in quite those terms back then). And I also knew the story of the whole Orson Welles radio broadcast thing, which added to the intrigue surrounding the book.

So, when I came to watch this adaptation, I considered it auspicious when the introductory prologue (after the pull-back shot from microsopic view to universe) consisted of an old-fashioned montage and reassuringly sonorous male 'historical' voiceover. The film proper gets off to a good start, too - I didn't mind that it focused on Tom Cruise and his family, rather than depicting Pentagon generals or fighter pilots or their ilk...in fact, this seemed a good approach given that, in the end, it's the air itself which brings the invaders undone rather than any technological might or scientific nous on humanity's part (though Spielberg can't resist giving us the sight of the military shooting down one of the tripods after its shields fail, complete with suitably vanquished - ie, dead ('the only good alien's a dead alien!'; wrong movie, I know...) - alien emerging at the end).

The scenes of destruction get the job done, and there's a pervasive unsettling feeling to much of the film (eg, the ghostly shots of the family's faces early on, the menacing fellow who takes Ray and Rachel into his basement, and particularly the culmination of that encounter), which is suitable. But the character arcs are predictable and not entirely convincing, and with the focus on the individuals and not on larger-than-life heroes, that proves to be a telling flaw. As a film crit might say, three stars out of five.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Well, the three famous songs - "Cinnamon Girl", "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" - are the three most memorable, and together comprise more than half of the running time of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. As to the others, the title track is one of those jangly mid-tempo semi-rockers that Neil does well, and is indeed quite good, "Round & Round (It Won't Be Long)" is a slow, not unpleasant but basically forgettable tune, "The Losing End (When You're On)" comes back to the mid-tempoisms, and "Running Dry (Requiem For The Rockets)" comes across as a kind of drunken dirge (it could be the strings).

As that summation suggests, this record is, for me, one of two parts - the three songs I knew, and then the rest. In fact, those three basically orient the album, which is bookended by "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" and seems to cohere around "Down By The River" at its centre. So, while I suppose that it must be good, it's hard for me to listen to it as a whole because, depending on how I'm listening to it on the particular occasion, either the famous ones or the ones I hadn't heard before tend to 'bulge' out as a group.

Hem - Eveningland

Gentle, sighing, soughing folk music. The singer (Sally Ellyson) has one of those heart in her throat type voices, and the full range of instrumentation that one would expect is around it - twangy and acoustic guitars, mandolin, banjo, piano, strings, assorted percussion and orchestral effects - and it's all very sweet and nice. It's kind of end-of-day music ('eveningland', I suppose) - graceful, delicate and finely-wrought - but with more of a tendency towards highlighted, upswooping choruses and occasional baroque ornateness than I'd expected, sometimes pulling the songs more towards the melancholy, downbeat end of country than the folk streams in which they're rooted.

It's very sincere, and more trad than, say, Azure Ray (and neither better nor worse than that duo by virtue of it - just different)...and is on Rounder rather than Saddle Creek, which pretty much tells the story. It's a bit strange listening to it, though, and reflecting that it must be closer to the origins of this kind of music than those who've become more popular with variations on it, but hearing bits of outfits like Azure Ray (not that they've yet become immensely popular), Mojave 3, the Sundays, even up-to-and-including-Surfacing Sarah McLachlan (especially, in relation to that last, on "Redwing"). I prefer the more mournful-sounding numbers - "Pacific Street", which I'd heard before, is my favourite.

Pure Movies

It was seeing Björk's name on the front which caused me to pick this up, and not recognising the song's title, "Play Dead", which caused me to buy it, coupled with the roll call of famous film songs that it contains (every last one of which I'd heard before - including, it turns out, the Björk cut...but I'm pretty sure that I don't have it on cd anywhere else, and it's a good song, suitably dramatic). The flavour of the thing can be appreciated by way of some thoughts about a few of the songs:
- "Love Is All Around". The first song on the compilation - enough said, really. Others in the 'enough said' category: "How Deep Is Your Love", "Up Where We Belong", "Lady In Red", "Unchained Melody", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", etc, etc.
- "Stuck In The Middle With You". This song has reminded me of Dylan in the past.
- "Blaze Of Glory". Some days I'm sorry that I taped over that old Bon Jovi best of. I mean, I probably replaced it with some Pink Floyd album or other...seriously, which one would I more often want to listen to? Bon Jovi'd win hands down.
- "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do". And all the Concretes, Shangri-Las, etc must be having an effect, 'cause I've been quite enjoying this one. So this is what they mean what they talk about slippery slopes...
- "Nights In White Satin". Well, next time I feel like listening to this song (ie, come next blue moon), I'll be able to do so on cd instead of firing up the groaning old laptop, I guess. Here, it's the triumphant set closer.

Bonus! There's an East 17 song! Wow, that Kalifornia soundtrack must be pretty weird.

Tim Winton - The Turning

Well, the best way to describe this collection of linked short stories would have to be 'Wintonesque' - they're so recognisably written in his voice, and set in the small town Australian milieu which he's made his own. It'd be easy to dismiss his imagery and symbolism as heavy-handed and obvious - 'literature for people who don't read literature' is the slur I might sling, if I were minded to do so - but, when Winton's name comes up (as it often does), I more often find myself arguing the opposite. I feel that his writing is very honest - unadorned without being plain...it's as if he, as a writer, is producing these books and saying 'well, this is what my writing is - take it or leave it', without any attempts to distract or cozen the reader. But simplicity is not always lack of subtlety or craft.

The Turning, then. More bruised, battling types, trying to make a go of things, poised between failure and contingent success (which only ever, in this world, seems to mean 'survival'). It's delicately done, though - the characters emerge and re-emerge as they cycle through the stories in different guises and are seen from different perspectives, and different parts of their individual and collective histories come to light. I'm not intimately familiar with his previous work, but I got the sense that these were maybe a bit less mysterious, less touched by grace, less filled by those minor key redemptive (or maybe 'affirmatory') moments. Good, though - I sat up nearly all night to finish it.

The axe for the frozen sea inside us: Summer reading list

Well, university is all over bar the handing-in tomorrow, so I thought that I'd make a partial summer reading list, composed indiscriminately of books that people have given me, books which I've bought but not read, books on one of my various lists of 'books to read' lists (some based on recommendations, some because I came across them while doing research for my literature essays, and some for no reason that I can recall), new and forthcoming books by favourite authors, books which I've been meaning to re-read, and academic books which I don't seriously think I'm actually going to get through. In no particular order:

Günter Grass - The Flounder
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains Of The Day
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Tim Winton - The Turning
Marcel Proust - Swann's Way
Raymond Queneau - The Bark Tree
Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Ian Watson - Chekhov's Journey
A S Byatt - Possession
Aragon - La Mise à Mort
Gérard de Nerval - Aurélia
Louis Guilloux - Le Sang Noir
Amélie Nothomb - Antechrista
China Miéville - Looking For Jake
Terry Pratchett - Thud
George R R Martin - A Feast For Crows [though I'll probably have to go back and read the earlier ones first, to refresh my memory]
Zadie Smith - On Beauty
Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology
Edmund Husserl - Ideas

Also, a couple of names: Alison Lurie and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Anyway, obviously I won't read all of those (and, conversely, will read many not on the list), but I can't help but feel that the making of a list like this is an optimistic gesture, in ways which extend beyond just reading and literature.

On perfect albums (and a list of my current top 20 favourite albums ever)

Listening to "American Flag" this afternoon and remembering why it's so great, I got to wondering about how I make sense out of my 'favourite' albums. Thinking about the lps which I do think of as my favourites, it's striking that I wouldn't consider any of them to be flawless or perfect (even to the extent that these are meaningful concepts when applied to pop records) - the closest are probably Loveless and Treasure, and in that respect it's probably telling that they're likely the two most distinctive-sounding records on the list (see below) and so perhaps the easiest to think of as 'perfect'.

Take Moon Pix, for example. I love this album, and definitely consider it to be one of my favourites, but for me, after the opening-in-glory that is "American Flag", it doesn't really properly hit its stride again until the run home, starting with track 7, "Moonshiner". So what's with that? It's one of my favourite albums and yet I reckon that it hasn't really 'hit its stride' for the better part of half its running time? Or take Funeral (admittedly an atypical one in that it's only been part of my life for a span of months, rather than years): there are really only two songs on that album - "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Rebellion (Lies)" - which I out and out love (though obviously any record on which cuts like "In The Backseat", "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)", "Haiti", etc, can be 'second tier' has a lot going for it), and yet right now I'm definitely counting it as a 'favourite'.

Some of it may be down to how 'high' the high points are. Plus, some of us are just wired to respond to the sound of certain albums. And it's never wise to underestimate the effect of the right record coming along at the right time...

Another important part of what's going on here is that 'perfection' and 'flawlessness' must be, to some extent, relativised to the particular album. Kate B once opined that Tigermilk was a perfect album, and I pretty much agreed (and still do), at least to the extent that it's a perfect album on its own terms...and this despite my thinking that Sinister (and maybe even Arab Strap) is probably 'better'. But how does that work? There's got to be an interplay between, on the one hand, the way in which every album - like every work of art - in some sense sets its own terms, and, on the other hand, the overall framework within which we make these kinds of value judgments, right? So where does that leave us?

Well, with another variation on the old subjective/objective thing, I suppose. In other words, it's ineffable.

* * *

1. Bachelor No 2, or The Last Remains of the Dodo - Aimee Mann
2. OK Computer - Radiohead
3. Loveless - My Bloody Valentine
4. Treasure - Cocteau Twins
5. Blue Bell Knoll - Cocteau Twins
6. The Velvet Underground & Nico - The Velvet Underground & Nico
7. Moon Pix - Cat Power
8. On Fire - Galaxie 500
9. New Adventures In Hi-Fi - R.E.M.
10. Summerteeth - Wilco
11. Homogenic - Björk
12. Isn't Anything - My Bloody Valentine
13. The Queen Is Dead - The Smiths
14. The Bends - Radiohead
15. Psychocandy - The Jesus and Mary Chain
16. Closer - Joy Division
17. Funeral - The Arcade Fire
18. Disintegration - The Cure
19. f#a#∞ - Godspeed You Black Emperor!
20. Blacklisted - Neko Case

Raymond E Feist - Prince of the Blood

Have done some serious damage to my sleep patterns in the last few weeks, to the extent that it's now difficult to sleep any time before 4, with 5 or 5.30 being more common (it's always a worry when you're trying to fall asleep as the sky outside is beginning to grow lighter).[*] Some nights, I can more or less push on with Heidegger pretty much till then (albeit not as efficiently as at more sane times of day/night), but on other nights, this leaves me with some dead time between shutting up shop for the night and actually being able to fall asleep. Last night was one such, and I really needed a break from the paper-writing to allow my thoughts to settle and take shape, all of which is to explain why I sat up and re-read what is really a particularly mediocre entry in the Feist oeuvre (I picked it up about a quarter of the way in, having read the first quarter or so relatively recently) - an oeuvre which is, incidentally, not particularly mediocre as a whole, as far as it goes - mainly on the basis that it'd be thoroughly undemanding and I didn't already know it absolutely inside out (unlike most of the other undemanding books on my shelf).

* * *

[*] Actually, I suspect that there are a host of other factors bleeding into this inability to sleep, but they all kind of aggregate and compound in - or are compounded by - the brute fact of not having slept properly in recent times.

"And death shall have no dominion": Solaris

[Edited 14/7/19 to remove some personal content]

Actually, this time round it seemed more of a sci-fi film than a metaphysical one (and no, I'm not trying to draw bright lines between the two). I've never been much of a reader of sci-fi, but I've dipped in from time to time, and once in a while a book in the genre (I don't really remember names, but I think that Greg Bear may've written one or two) has given me a strange, dislocated sort of feeling, as if I really am reading about a kind of refracted reality - plausible but distorted (perhaps the word I'm looking for is 'uncanny' - unheimlich), making me feel as if the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Anyway, Solaris made me feel like that.

See, the first time I watched the film, I was thinking more in terms of it exploring the nature of reality and its interaction with consciousness (phenomenology again, though this would've been before I formally studied 'phenomenology and existentialism', I think), but this time round, Solaris seemed more like a 'sci-fi' concept around which was built a recognisably humanistic moral and rational core (again, not that this and 'metaphysics' are mutually exclusive).

The mood it creates is really something, and it looks and feels exactly as it should. It's artfully done - the way that memories and perceptual streams are shot as formally disconnected yet fade into each other (the device of the visuals dropping away while dialogue continues is an effective one) and also the structuring of the film as a whole, particularly the repetitions...all quite dream-like, or memory-like, or maybe simply everyday experience-like, when you stop to reflect on it.

The sci-fi and the metaphysics are hard to disentangle; the Sistine chapel moment near the end strikes me as a pivotal scene, one way or another. This is such a strange thing for me to write, but I somehow felt in that final scene (the one in Kelvin's apartment, I mean - not the Sistine chapel one) as if I might almost be able to believe in something like heaven, in principle, perhaps - but in the realm of sci-fi or that of phenomenology? Well, that's the question, I guess.

Background music, and studying

I think that it was only really this year - or maybe '04 at the very earliest - that I admitted that working with music on is distracting. If I really want and need to think hard about something - which was rarely the case until the final stages of my uni career - then silence is the way to go, the exception being when I'm really pushed (say, on the night before a paper is due) and need some kind of background stimulation to prevent me from just subsiding into total inactivity and/or falling asleep. Since it's been all about writing and, consequently, actual thinking this year (as opposed to the largely automatic grind of studying for law exams), and because I've been taking arts seriously, this has meant that a fair amount of my working time has been sans music.

Still, in this twilight period of ten days (post-Thesis/literature papers but pre-final philo paper), I've found myself mostly writing/thinking with music on, and doing so reasonably productively, which I think is attributable to my having gotten into the right sort of zone for absorbing and thinking about philosophy over the last, say, month or so (though it's really probably been cumulative over the course of this whole year, and particularly the last semester). It's strange how one's mind shifts into different configurations over time, according to the influences to which it's (ahem) subject - although I guess that the strangeness inheres more in those shifts and resultant configurations not being directly accessible but rather only becoming apparent in their 'outputs' (as thoughts, ideas, conversational modes, etc), than in the idea of the shifting itself.

So anyway, mostly this background music has involved:
- Year of Meteors
- Humming By The Flowered Vine ("What You Said" is my favourite at the moment)
- Wilco (mostly A Ghost Is Born and the first disc of Being There)
- Eva Cassidy (uh-oh, adult contemporary beckons)
- Cat Power's rather stunning newie, "The Greatest" (is Matador the best label in the world these days?)

Talulah Gosh - Janice Long session, 7 August 1986 & Peel session, 11 January 1988

I've been listening to these for a while, but just now thought that I might as well remark upon it (y'know, for future reference and all that). Talulah Gosh were a simply fabulous indie outfit from the eighties who became quite famous in certain circles with their straight-ahead but clever bubblegum pop (funny how I always seem to end up using that descriptor 'bubblegum' in a positive way) - sort of one part 60s girl group melodies and vibes, and one part ny punk attitude and buzzy guitars (no bass, but plenty of backing vocals and handclaps!)...two-minute songs galore (all about boys, and sung by girls, of course).

These radio sessions were more or less my introduction to the band (though I'd heard some of their stuff on last.fm as similar music to the Sundays, or Lush, or Belly, or the Shangri-Las, or summat) and they're wonderful. Favourites: "Looking For A Rainbow", "Talulah Gosh", "World's Ending", and "Spearmint Head", all concentrated blasts of sweetness. Stand by for the inevitable spending of too much money to import their best-of...

Also, pitchfork recently ran a feature on the whole c86/twee movement, which was good for two reasons: it allowed me to feel superior at being ahead of the curve (ha!), but it also gave me the pleasant sense of being part of a wider community of taste...so, the best of both worlds, really.

The Janice Long one is here and the John Peel one is here.

Laura Veirs - Year of Meteors

Much as I like the charmful Laura, I didn't race out to buy her latest, Year of Meteors, as soon as it hit the stores, several weeks ago now. There were two main reasons for this: the previous one, Carbon Glacier, while rightly (if somewhat surprisingly) embraced by the masses, had quite literally left me just a little bit cold by comparison to Troubled By The Fire (so I liked it rather a lot, and if anything considered it to be a step forward from TBTF, but didn't find myself really feeling the record); and I'd listened to and liked but again not really loved the samples which were up on Veirs' website (although that's such an unideal way to listen to music that I didn't place much stock in it...).

Anyhow, the other night I made a flying visit to uni to photocopy/borrow some Heidegger stuff, and stopped off at Readings in the expectation that a brief browse would be likely to improve my (not particularly poor to start with) state of mind (plus, I'd been struck by this weird dizziness, possibly born of lack of sleep + general being in a slightly weird headspace, and thought it might not be the world's worst idea to try to shake it off before driving home); ended up leaving with Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (well, it was cheap), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard not Nothomb, although I did read somewhere recently that there's a new Nothomb in translation which will be out soon - good news), and this cd.

I suppose that hoping that Veirs will record another "Ohio Clouds" or "Midnight Singer" is a bit like hoping that Radiohead will do another "Fake Plastic Trees" or "Street Spirit", although, like that latter hope, it's not entirely implausible if one is willing to accept that the resultant 'doing of another' would come wrapped in a fairly different sonic cloak. And, on its own terms, Year of Meteors is pretty fine. It continues in the direction indicated by Carbon Glacier, but it's a bit less distanced and cool, if equally echoey and vibey. Electric guitar is much more prominent (my fave moment on CG is still "Salvage A Smile", short as it is) and it's overall a bit more upbeat and drifty - 'oceanic', as is often the case with music I like, isn't too far off the mark (so okay, not that upbeat). It's actually a really neat sound overall, the folk strands are still very much there, and the electronic bits integrate well, and I'm not sure that anyone else is really doing a similar thing right now (Beth Orton, sorta...and there's a faint-but-definitely-there edge of New Adventures in Hi-Fi to its vibes, too).

Opener "Fire Snakes" is pretty cool, and likewise second track "Galaxies" (surely the first single, if any get released). "Magnetized" is the sort of gorgeous slow-burner which floats along and then suddenly gives you the chills, and somewhat recalls her older stuff, but it's probably the boppy "Rialto", complete with handclaps and that tasty wavery ragged crunchy guitar sound, which is my favourite; also particularly like "Parisian Dream", which slinks in on a slippy viola line and shuffles back and forth over the top of it for the rest of the song.

A few other scattered thoughts:
- After couple of listens, I realised that the familiar-sounding descending scale which features prominently in "Where Gravity Is Dead" has also been used in the Muses' "Honeychain", and hence the familiarity.
- Speaking of "Where Gravity Is Dead", I wonder if there's a vague kind of concept to the album, a thought prompted by a corresponding lyric from "Galaxies": "gravity is dead you see/no gravity!/ all I need is beating red/no gravity! ...".
- Also, one corollary of getting into all these singer-songwriters is that an increasing number of the records I own have pictures of the artist's face on their covers; I can live with this as a seemingly necessary evil, but I'm really not at all down with it. (Q: Would it make a difference if they were all extremely good-looking? A: No, that's completely not the point.)

The Nightmare Before Christmas

This one had managed to get by me until now, and it was as much of a treat as I'd always anticipated in that vague way of mine. One thing that I hadn't realised - and which would've sharpened that anticipation - is that it's a musical (in the way that animated films often are); another thing which I hadn't known is that Disney is the studio behind the film. But of course the main event here is the Tim Burton thing, and on that score it's exactly what I'd expected - deft morbidity and grotesquerie, splashed with colour and wit and general vim, and populated by characters who are all recognisably human, even if they also happen to be skellingtons, stitched-together dolls, or other escapees from the menagerie of our collective nightmarescapes (ha, ha).

Writing this is making me think, though, about just what it is about Burton characters (at least his central protagonists). They always feel real, in a way that the characters in a film like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums only kind of do. One feels that there are actual emotions and feelings driving them - for all of their (literally, in this case) cartoonish appearances, they never seem opaque or truly alien (whereas I find a lot of people I know in real life to be quite alien, for example, including some with whom I get along really well).

A'course, that's not to say that Burton's characters are somehow more truthfully rendered than Anderson's. Truth is a multi-faceted thing, and I thought that there was a lot of truth in the characterisations in another film about extremely opaque people which I saw earlier this year, Intolerable Cruelty. There's a difference between understanding someone in terms of 'getting' what's going on 'inside', and understanding them in terms of knowing how they respond to certain stimuli (a 'black box' picture), and I'm not sure that the first is necessarily more profound than the second. But I think that what I mean to say, maybe, is that I can always quite directly identify with Burton's main protagonists (and, let's face it, this is what I'm talking about when I talk about truth, right?).

So that's not going to surprise anyone, least of all me. Am I surprised that this principle should also operate in relation to an animated film - and not one with any notable aspirations to realism, at that? Not really, but a little bit. Emotional responses to animated films are nothing remarkable - for me, this goes at least back to primary school and An American Tail (did I spell that correctly?) - but direct identifications are perhaps just a little bit so (Daria?). Then again, Jack Skellington is a character outline in pretty broad brush strokes, so how much of myself do I really see in him? Maybe it's like reading one's horoscope in the newspaper and being astonished by its accuracy. Then again, maybe the animation form allows a distillation of what's always going on with any identification with Burton characters, or even cinematic characters period.

Anyway.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is very sweet and amusing and made me feel better about everything. The tunes are a bit unmemorable but there's not much else to criticise, and besides, it's the sort of film that one doesn't want to criticise. I liked the trick-or-treaters, and basically everything else about it. And okay, I did identify quite a lot with Jack. So there.

Cocteau Twins - Twinlights EP

I haven't listened to the Cocteau Twins so intensely this year, but they still have a pretty fair claim to being my favourite band ever; so, I've been looking for this ep for a while and recently came across it here. It's a bit of a curio, being made up of extremely stripped back (mostly just piano and voice) versions of Cocteaus songs - "Rilkean Heart" and "Half-Gifts" from their final lp, Milk & Kisses (though I think the deal is that Twinlights actually came out before Milk & Kisses), "Pink Orange Red" (off the Tiny Dynamine ep), and one, "Golden-Veins", which seems to've been written and recorded specifically for this ep (though there's also a version of it on their bbc sessions cd)...

Anyway, they're all very much of a piece with one another, delicate, hushed and pretty - and notably different from anything else the band has done (the closest reference point is Victorialand, but that's not very close). I prefer the versions with which I'm more familiar over the ones on this record, unsurprisingly (representative microcosm: the vocal flutters which chime "Pink Orange Red" out comprise one of my favourite moments in the Cocteaus' extensive back catalogue of wonders - in fact, the song is one of my very favourites, along with "Lorelei" and "Heaven Or Las Vegas", and maybe "Musette And Drums" and "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" (and "Blue Bell Knoll", and "Carolyn's Fingers", and ...) - and the more subdued fluting we get here is, while in keeping with the set's overall tone, just immeasurably less magic), but these versions have a modest, unobtrusive charm of their own.

Re-reading the subject: The White Hotel (and the increasingly short run home)

I've reflected before on the way that our relationships with works of art have a continuing existence beyond our particular encounters with them - the relationship that I have with a novel, say, continues in the spaces when I'm not actually reading it - and that the nature of those relationships can shift quite markedly in the spaces between the encounters. One good example of this for me has been The White Hotel, which has really opened up for me over the course of the semester, and particularly over the last week or so, during which time I've had it on the 'back burner' of my mind, allowing it to simmer as I've had Lacan &c in the foreground in the hopes that the twain would meet somewhere in my half-thought thoughts. Anyhow, have just browsed through the text itself; reading very much framed by the demands of the particular paper that I plan to write about it and the time constraints under which said paper-writing will need to proceed (as to which, see below). But finally, I like this book. I really wouldn't have expected to at all (after my first reading), but I do.

Right, this is how the (university-related) big picture looks right now:

Thesis [7 November]: 8400 words (/10 000). This is the major worry at present - I made a bit of a dent in it today (Thursday) but am still pretty far off from wrapping it all up into a decent argument. Plus, that 8400 is nowhere near as concise as my academic writing normally is, meaning that in effect it's somewhat less than that figure (though, circumstances being what they are, a bit of flabbiness in my prose may not be such a bad thing, as it'll bring me closer to the required word length).

Contemporary Historical Fictions [7 November]: Basically finished. Although I haven't had the time to pull all of its threads together, I'm pretty happy with the way this one has turned out.

Reading The Subject [7 November]: 1800 words (/4000). Well, this is what they call 'progress', I guess. After really struggling with the bloody thing, I've managed to carve out a reasonable recapitulation of the Seminar and plot an approximate narrative for my own paper (looks like it's going to be three of three English papers I've written this year in which Derrida gets a guernsey). The plan is to finish this tomorrow (well, today, but it counts as tomorrow once I've slept on it) so that I'll have two full days and nights, plus whatever of Monday I need, to do the Thesis.

Recent European Philosophy [17 November]: 0 words (/5000). And this is what they call (planned) 'lack of progress', I know.

Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads/Jonathan Demme)

David lent this to me without any particular provocation, and I sat down to watch it last night in the interests of procrastination (a recurring theme, though less so these last few days as I've been trying to make sense of the Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' and so on). I've had a copy of the associated cd for a while, so I was already pretty well familiar with the music; the interest lay in seeing if it lived up to the hype (on the cover of the dvd: "The most extraordinary rock movie ever made" gasps Uncut; "The Citizen Kane of the concerts movies" burbles The Face). And, well, it's pretty cool, and it's fun to see a young, hyper-skinny (look who's talking) David Byrne strutting his stuff and especially with the whole band and associates getting into it - "Life During Wartime" is a particular highlight - and the music is fab of course and obviously the Heads were a great live band and I was feeling the joy and the craziness and I was hanging out for the "my god, what have I done?", but I don't know, maybe I was just taking it for granted that it'd be like that because somehow I only sort of enjoyed it as if from a distance (not so uncommon for me these days, that). Gotta watch this one again when the fires are burning a bit more brightly.

Emily Haines - Cut In Half And Also Double

This courtesy of That Girl Needs Therapy. I hadn't heard of Haines before; seems that she now sings in a band called Metric (as to which I also draw a blank), and is somehow associated with the whole Broken Social Scene...uh...scene (then again, isn't everyone these days?), and this is a somewhat obscure recording of hers from a few years back.

The sound is basically indie-rock female singer-songwriter w/guitar - useful reference points here being, maybe, the Breeders and Throwing Muses/solo Kristin (the vox in particular sometimes being reminiscent of the fraughtness of that last), though more lo-fi than any of those, and less immediate to boot. I'm quite liking it, but it's not going to set my world on fire; best song for mine is opener "Dog".

Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath - "Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives"

Spent a while this afternoon reading through these strange little 'detective' narratives. For some reason, they strike me as having a faintly Gorey flavour - could be the surreal edge and bizarre 'logic', not to mention the intimations of metaphysics at the edges, and maybe the self-contained, puzzled eccentricity of the shut-in detectives themselves, Peter and Jenny (there's also a wee bit of Dorothy Parker in some moments) - but the whole point is the contemporary settings, of course. It goes something like this:

Last year, Jenny Traig and Peter McGrath, cousins, left their jobs to become self-declared shut-ins. They quickly discovered that even the shut-in's life is full of many small mysteries. Inspired by the great tradition of housebound detectives, they resolved to become investigators themselves. The following are cases from their files.

And here is an example:

* * *

#22: The Case of the Lonely Detectives OR Why Doesn't Anyone Ask Us Out?
Status: Solved

One evening, after drinking more than is their habit, the Shut-Ins found themselves in a maudlin and introspective mood. Draining his second Brandy Alexander, Peter asked, "Why is it, dear cousin, that no one ever asks us out? You, in particular, are what they call a 'catch.' If your mood swings are any indication, you are still fertile, and your uncommonly wide midsection suggests you'd bear children easily. And yet no man has snapped you up. How can that be?"

"I could ask the same about you," Jenny replied. "You are fun company. Those deeply carved lines around your mouth and eyes suggest you laugh easily and often. And yet, here you sit, alone." Peter shook his head. "It's a mystery, indeed." What was the cause?

"Perhaps it's because we so rarely leave the house," Jenny suggested. Peter countered that this often heightened one's allure. Wasn't Greta Garbo the most pursued woman in the world?

Well, then, perhaps astrology was to blame. Peter disagreed. "We're different signs. We can't be under the same bad star. But maybe the problem is bad feng shui." Jenny dissented. "That can't be, either, because feng shui is a load of crap."

The cousins were stymied. But a few hours later, as they settled into late-night TV, the mystery solved itself. As a talk show reminded the detectives, people are often single because they are too hot. "The answer, in a phrase, is that we're too sexy for our shirts," Jenny announced. Peter nodded in agreement. "There's a perp, all right, and it's our own damned attractiveness." The Shut-Ins toasted each other's tragic allure before falling asleep in their respective chairs, where they remained, snoring delicately, until morning.

* * *

But really the case studies need to be read as a whole for maximum effect - cumulatively, they're v. funny.

Traig & McGrath, Shut-In Detectives