Mmm...not sure what I thought of this one. It's fun, and gleefully looks the part, but I can't shake the feeling that it's also on the insubstantial side. Part of the problem here is that I'm holding it up against previous Tim Burton films, and the book, and the previous screen adaptation (even though I only have vague impressions of those latter two) - compared to most mainstream fare, it's amazingly weird. This Willy Wonka has a nasty streak, but it manifests itself in dismissiveness and aloofness rather than appearing as the working through of any genuine malevolence, and he's a sympathetic character, his back story filled in and his quirks 'explained' (having chuckled at the craziness throughout, the first thing I said to Nenad afterwards was 'awwww', at the sweetness of the film's ending).
There's a certain mawkishness to much of Burton's work (one of the things which makes me nervous about watching Big Fish), which is generally balanced by the more fantastic aspects of his films and a sense of how far to go (I'm thinking particularly of Edward Scissorhands here). That's present here, too, and while at first I wasn't 100% sold on the spin he puts on the Wonka character, it's ringing a bit more truly now (I don't recall there being anything in the way of family background for him in Dahl's book - my impression is that he was more of a sui generis figure there - but I could be wrong, and if all of that is Burton's fabrication, well, all the better). Charlie and his grandpa don't get to do that much except be exemplars of wide-eyed good-naturedness, but that's fine. The other children - and their parents - are suitably obnoxious, in a 'I want to see more of them' kind of way. And the oompa loompas are, well, pretty much beyond description and so about what you'd expect.
Incidentally, this film also made me go 'mmm' in a different sense, inasmuch as it reminded me of the gorgeousness of Helena Bonham Carter, but that's another story...
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
Laura Cantrell - Humming By The Flowered Vine
I always think that there's something just a little bit magic about the way that music comes to be woven through one's life. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, for I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's something to do with the way that music can come to feel so naturally and familiarly part of day-to-day existence, both internally and externally, and something to do with the sense of 'at home-ness' that comes from listening to music which has been transmuted in that way - a sense of rightness, profound in its intangibility. It's a feeling that can be either contemporaneous or retrospective (or, where the nature of the weave shifts over time, both), and often finds its inception in simple repeat playing of an album/song (the repeated playing acting as cause rather than effect, at least initially).
I bring this up in an attempt to make sense of how I feel about Humming By The Flowered Vine, an album about which I do feel this way just now and the main thing that I've listened to over the last couple of days. It wouldn't quite be accurate to say that it's slipped under my guard, for I fully expected it to be a treat, but I still feel as if something like that has happened, probably because the album's pleasures are so delicate and subtle. As a whole, it's somehow slighter than the music of, say, Lucinda or Gillian (always my points of reference for contemporary female countryish singer-songwriter types), and it's that which caused me to be surprised when I realised that I'd internalised it notwithstanding.
As I said, I did expect the album to be a treat, mostly on the strength of unutterably sweet lead single and album opener "14th Street" (available from her website along with plenty of other good stuff), which I've had on high rotation in recent months. I'd also heard Cantrell's take on an unrecorded Lucinda song, "Letters", which I'd heard on the radio, and a pair of Cantrell-composed ballads, "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", which came to me through some music blog or other, but the thing is that only "14th Street" had really captured my attention, "Letters" having been a once-off hearing and the other two coming across as 'nice but not essential' - which is what made me think that, apart from the unassuming nature of the music, that sense of music-weaving has also been at play in my liking of the album.
As it looks now, then, all ten songs are lovely in their own right, but I particularly like "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", both sparse, plaintive odes, the gradual burn of "Letters" (unusual in that it's partly propelled by electric guitar), summery closer "Old Downtown", and, of course, "14th Street", which is still gorgeous - lilting, melodic and yearnful (so, in the end, mostly those that I'd heard before - though of course I've just named half of the record!). I'm not sure what it is that I particularly like about Cantrell - her singing voice and style of singing are very winsome, but I think that almost as much of the appeal resides in the insightful, uncluttered arrangements of the songs and the high level of understated musicianship throughout. Very lovely.
I bring this up in an attempt to make sense of how I feel about Humming By The Flowered Vine, an album about which I do feel this way just now and the main thing that I've listened to over the last couple of days. It wouldn't quite be accurate to say that it's slipped under my guard, for I fully expected it to be a treat, but I still feel as if something like that has happened, probably because the album's pleasures are so delicate and subtle. As a whole, it's somehow slighter than the music of, say, Lucinda or Gillian (always my points of reference for contemporary female countryish singer-songwriter types), and it's that which caused me to be surprised when I realised that I'd internalised it notwithstanding.
As I said, I did expect the album to be a treat, mostly on the strength of unutterably sweet lead single and album opener "14th Street" (available from her website along with plenty of other good stuff), which I've had on high rotation in recent months. I'd also heard Cantrell's take on an unrecorded Lucinda song, "Letters", which I'd heard on the radio, and a pair of Cantrell-composed ballads, "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", which came to me through some music blog or other, but the thing is that only "14th Street" had really captured my attention, "Letters" having been a once-off hearing and the other two coming across as 'nice but not essential' - which is what made me think that, apart from the unassuming nature of the music, that sense of music-weaving has also been at play in my liking of the album.
As it looks now, then, all ten songs are lovely in their own right, but I particularly like "Khaki & Corduroy" and "Bees", both sparse, plaintive odes, the gradual burn of "Letters" (unusual in that it's partly propelled by electric guitar), summery closer "Old Downtown", and, of course, "14th Street", which is still gorgeous - lilting, melodic and yearnful (so, in the end, mostly those that I'd heard before - though of course I've just named half of the record!). I'm not sure what it is that I particularly like about Cantrell - her singing voice and style of singing are very winsome, but I think that almost as much of the appeal resides in the insightful, uncluttered arrangements of the songs and the high level of understated musicianship throughout. Very lovely.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Radiohead - "Karma Police" cd single (Australian)
Completism rearing its head again (looking at a discography on greenplastic.com has made me realise how far I've got to go, though, even with my restricted aim of just trying to collect all the songs in their various versions, as opposed to all of the different packagings). B-sides are "A Reminder" and "Melatonin", neither of which I've heard before (though the title of that latter, at least, sounds familiar). I particularly like the Low-esque synths and Yorke plaintive prettiness on "Melatonin", and both sulk and climb in that lovely Radiohead way - I'd give them pass marks even when graded against the high standard of Radiohead b-sides generally.
A Very Long Engagement
I was just thinking about which films' cinematic releases I've most keenly anticipated in the last few years - and, by extension, ever - and I think that A Very Long Engagement may be top 3 to date (the others being Donnie Darko and Amélie). All signs were auspicious - directed by Jeunet, starring Audrey Tautou, and I'd loved the book, having tracked it down secondhand and read it a while back after hearing of the film adaptation.
In other words: "Objectivity? What of it?".
This time, was struck more forcibly by film's nature as wartime romantic epic but, oddly (in light of that), wasn't as swept up by the drama and romance (the first time round, I had the shivery chills at a few key emotional moments) - maybe the relative lack of emotional response on my part was simply due to this viewing's second-timeness. Still liked it heaps, though in a different way from The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, and differently again from Amélie (Alien: Resurrection was decent, but in these parts we don't count it as part of the Jeunet oeuvre proper)...I suppose that it's a bit pointless to compare Jeunet films anyway, given that each has come at such a different point in my life, and that my responses to them have been accordingly shaped by my perspective at the time (moreover, both The City of Lost Children and Amélie have, in their different ways, been such talismanic films for me that I don't hesitate to say that they've actively crystallised and shaped important features of my mental landscapes)...
So yes, A Very Long Engagement = good.
In other words: "Objectivity? What of it?".
This time, was struck more forcibly by film's nature as wartime romantic epic but, oddly (in light of that), wasn't as swept up by the drama and romance (the first time round, I had the shivery chills at a few key emotional moments) - maybe the relative lack of emotional response on my part was simply due to this viewing's second-timeness. Still liked it heaps, though in a different way from The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, and differently again from Amélie (Alien: Resurrection was decent, but in these parts we don't count it as part of the Jeunet oeuvre proper)...I suppose that it's a bit pointless to compare Jeunet films anyway, given that each has come at such a different point in my life, and that my responses to them have been accordingly shaped by my perspective at the time (moreover, both The City of Lost Children and Amélie have, in their different ways, been such talismanic films for me that I don't hesitate to say that they've actively crystallised and shaped important features of my mental landscapes)...
So yes, A Very Long Engagement = good.
The Best of Patsy Cline
Since becoming infatuated with "I Fall To Pieces", I've been minded to buy some kind of Patsy Cline best of; finally came to it a couple of days ago, and, I have to say, it makes me happy that I did so. The music sounds inescapably retro, of course, but I think that may be part of the appeal for me; also, while Cline's usually spoken of as a country singer (having been affiliated with Nashville et al), I hear a fair amount of the contemporaneous sixties girl-group pop sound in these songs (apparently the story is that, for one reason and another, she didn't really hit her straps until the sixties, whereupon she had three or so years of glory before dying in a plane crash in '63).
Set off nicely by the retro feel is the swooning romanticism of these songs and Cline's delivery of them. She invests her material with such feeling, and, taken with her crystalline voice, it's easy to see why people rate her as a truly great singer. It may be deeply unfashionable today to sing in such a clear-toned, heartfelt fashion, but, having finally made my way to a point where I can appreciate and feel her singing, I'm inclined to think that the music made by this one just may be a bit timeless.
Set off nicely by the retro feel is the swooning romanticism of these songs and Cline's delivery of them. She invests her material with such feeling, and, taken with her crystalline voice, it's easy to see why people rate her as a truly great singer. It may be deeply unfashionable today to sing in such a clear-toned, heartfelt fashion, but, having finally made my way to a point where I can appreciate and feel her singing, I'm inclined to think that the music made by this one just may be a bit timeless.
Mary Chapin Carpenter - Stones in the Road
Somewhere midway between country and folk, teased through with the usual more or less implied rock elements - sort of like Lucinda Williams crossed with Natalie Merchant/10,000 Maniacs, but without the melodies or the spark. Eminently pleasant-sounding, but also eminently unmemorable.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes and Dream Country
It's come as a bit of a surprise to me that I've worked my way through nearly the entire Sandman series in this scattershot fashion - in fact, after a bit of thinking, I'm fairly confident that I've read all of them except the last, The Wake (I've said it before and no doubt will say it again many more times: I'm really going to miss the university libraries).
Anyhow, Preludes & Nocturnes was the very first collection, and it's much more straightforwardly 'horror' than any of the subsequent ones. In certain respects, I'd spoilt this one by having read the prefatory notes to volume 2, The Doll's House, which summarise the events of Preludes & Nocturnes, but of course finding out what's going to happen is only half the pleasure. I don't know how much I'd have enjoyed these without the connecting thread of the whole Sandman thing - meeting Judy, say, or seeing Morpheus' battle with Choronzon to recover his helmet. Again, there's a very strong sense of 'story' throughout. And, coming after this procession of darkness and horrors (not always hand-in-hand), "The Sound of Her Wings", which is the last issue reprinted here and also the first of The Doll's House, is even more of a relief.
Dream Country is also from relatively early in the series - volume 3 - and it collects four shorter narratives: "Calliope", "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Façade". All enjoyable, but relatively minor, I feel.
Anyhow, Preludes & Nocturnes was the very first collection, and it's much more straightforwardly 'horror' than any of the subsequent ones. In certain respects, I'd spoilt this one by having read the prefatory notes to volume 2, The Doll's House, which summarise the events of Preludes & Nocturnes, but of course finding out what's going to happen is only half the pleasure. I don't know how much I'd have enjoyed these without the connecting thread of the whole Sandman thing - meeting Judy, say, or seeing Morpheus' battle with Choronzon to recover his helmet. Again, there's a very strong sense of 'story' throughout. And, coming after this procession of darkness and horrors (not always hand-in-hand), "The Sound of Her Wings", which is the last issue reprinted here and also the first of The Doll's House, is even more of a relief.
Dream Country is also from relatively early in the series - volume 3 - and it collects four shorter narratives: "Calliope", "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Façade". All enjoyable, but relatively minor, I feel.
Vertigo
This is the set text for the "Reading the Subject" seminar in a couple of weeks' time; given the extra effort involved in getting hold of a copy of the film (as opposed to just reading something), I might well not have bothered in the ordinary course of events, but probably my favourite person in the class is giving the class paper that week and so, thus motivated, I sat down to watch the film last night.
My initial impressions are a bit of a mess (I'm deliberately writing this before reading the film-crit articles in the course reader). To my eyes, the film is very stylised and very chilly, and some of the effects are a bit hokey (though still effectively disconcerting). That all serves to keep the viewer at a distance (perhaps especially the contemporary viewer, as opposed to one who watched the film when it was first released), which is not entirely a bad thing, since it also kept me guessing and unsure of what to make of the characters' interactions and motives; it also meant that the central love plot took me by surprise (though in retrospect it really oughtn't to have).
The film is artfully constructed - the various bits and pieces of the plot slot neatly into place, one by one, and it all looks great...camera angles shift dizzyingly and almost always seem just right, but it's destabilising, because no sooner does one become oriented than the next shift occurs. It also seems a very symbolically charged film - the role of the feminine in particular. (And I wondered what the particular significance of the colour green was.) The leads - James Stewart and Kim Novak - seemed right, acting somehow as if from a great distance, almost to the point of stiltedness (though again I don't know if that just reflects my modern perspective on then-contemporary modes of interacting).
My initial impressions are a bit of a mess (I'm deliberately writing this before reading the film-crit articles in the course reader). To my eyes, the film is very stylised and very chilly, and some of the effects are a bit hokey (though still effectively disconcerting). That all serves to keep the viewer at a distance (perhaps especially the contemporary viewer, as opposed to one who watched the film when it was first released), which is not entirely a bad thing, since it also kept me guessing and unsure of what to make of the characters' interactions and motives; it also meant that the central love plot took me by surprise (though in retrospect it really oughtn't to have).
The film is artfully constructed - the various bits and pieces of the plot slot neatly into place, one by one, and it all looks great...camera angles shift dizzyingly and almost always seem just right, but it's destabilising, because no sooner does one become oriented than the next shift occurs. It also seems a very symbolically charged film - the role of the feminine in particular. (And I wondered what the particular significance of the colour green was.) The leads - James Stewart and Kim Novak - seemed right, acting somehow as if from a great distance, almost to the point of stiltedness (though again I don't know if that just reflects my modern perspective on then-contemporary modes of interacting).
Luka Bloom - Before Sleep Comes
My introduction to Luka Bloom was his cover of U2's "Bad", which got played a bit on the radio a few years back (along with other tracks from his rather good album of covers of pop songs, Keeper of the Flame, which also included "Throw Your Arms Around Me", "No Surprises", "In Between Days" and "Dancing Queen"). Bloom's an Irish folk-singer type, basically voice + acoustic guitar, and I remember his version of "Bad" opened up the song for me in a way which had never happened before; having heard it, I went back to the original version and appreciated its greatness for the first time.
I don't know what the rest of Bloom's work is like (I get the impression that he's quite prolific), but Before Sleep Comes is gentle, wistful, and pretty. There's not a great deal to it - 30 minutes of softly undulating ballads, and in Bloom's own words, it's "a cd of non-performance", recorded over two nights - but what there is, is very nice.
I don't know what the rest of Bloom's work is like (I get the impression that he's quite prolific), but Before Sleep Comes is gentle, wistful, and pretty. There's not a great deal to it - 30 minutes of softly undulating ballads, and in Bloom's own words, it's "a cd of non-performance", recorded over two nights - but what there is, is very nice.
Waikiki - I'm Already Home
Alternative radio rock-pop, done in that indie Australian way (reference points here are bands like Deadstar and George). "Here Comes September", a melodic power-pop number, got a bit of airplay a while ago and I still quite like it, but the album covers a bit more ground than I might've expected (which is to the good). Overall, a solid record.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Terry Pratchett - Going Postal
Well, I'm not really supposed to be reading anything which doesn't relate to uni at least until my thesis is done, and probably until the final coursework paper is handed in, but: (1) in a sense, I started reading Going Postal before my self-imposed ban came into effect, as I've been gradually working my way through it in bookstores at very scattered intervals over the last few months; (2) I'd placed a hold on it with Rowden White, also before that ban was instituted; and (3) (and most importantly) it's a Pratchett which I haven't read before.
So, I was determined to savour the book but, despite that resolution, it was all over in a day (a couple of days later, I re-read it). First things first - it's good, and there continues to be no appreciable slipping in the quality of the series. A few specific thoughts:
- Very much has the characteristic Pratchett lightness, but doesn't seem to be as laugh-out-loud funny as most.
- Possibly relatedly, the 'thematising' seems a bit more obvious than in most of his previous books - freedom and reinvention of self (separately and in conjunction) in particular. The more I think about those themes, though, the more I realise the complexity of his treatment of them.
- Moist von Lipwig is an appealing central character, with a bit more personality than some of Pratchett's other 'once off' leads (Victor Tugelbend and Pteppic come to mind).
- And in the prickly, cynical, chain-smoking, very-attractive-in-a-severely-plain-dress Adora Belle Dearheart, the book contains probably my favourite female Pratchett character to date bar Susan (I like Granny Weatherwax as well, but in a different way).
- Has a few fairly cheap jokes - not sure if these types have always been in Discworld books or not...eg:
So, I was determined to savour the book but, despite that resolution, it was all over in a day (a couple of days later, I re-read it). First things first - it's good, and there continues to be no appreciable slipping in the quality of the series. A few specific thoughts:
- Very much has the characteristic Pratchett lightness, but doesn't seem to be as laugh-out-loud funny as most.
- Possibly relatedly, the 'thematising' seems a bit more obvious than in most of his previous books - freedom and reinvention of self (separately and in conjunction) in particular. The more I think about those themes, though, the more I realise the complexity of his treatment of them.
- Moist von Lipwig is an appealing central character, with a bit more personality than some of Pratchett's other 'once off' leads (Victor Tugelbend and Pteppic come to mind).
- And in the prickly, cynical, chain-smoking, very-attractive-in-a-severely-plain-dress Adora Belle Dearheart, the book contains probably my favourite female Pratchett character to date bar Susan (I like Granny Weatherwax as well, but in a different way).
- Has a few fairly cheap jokes - not sure if these types have always been in Discworld books or not...eg:
Moist shrugged. 'Oh, all right. Of course, I accept as natural born criminal, habitual liar, fraudster and totally untrustworthy perverted genius.'or Miss Dearheart's dry comment while looking over the stamps designed by Moist:
'Capital! Welcome to government service!' said Lord Vetinari, extending his hand.
'Oh, the Tower of Art ... how like a man.'Anyway, while I don't think that it'll become one of my favourite Discworld novels, Going Postal is a very solid entry in the series.
Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
Sufjan Stevens seems to've been lumped in with this new- or avant-folk movement that's supposedly happening right now, but I'm not entirely convinced - to me, on the basis of this album at least, he seems more in line with the whole orchestral- or chamber-pop thing, albeit with definite folky elements. It's all pretty, lush, warm horns, strings and woodwind, with vocals either mildly jaunty or mildly melancholy, reminding me sometimes of Belle and Sebastian (especially the vocal and melody on "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!"), or perhaps Architecture in Helsinki ("The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders", say) and even, on "The Seer's Tower", of Will Oldham.
I reckon that Illinois is a really good record, but I don't find it amazing or revelatory; in lots of ways, I feel similarly about it to the way I do about a comparable one from last year, Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender. It works best as a whole - even at a sprawling 74 minutes - but songs that I particularly like at the moment include "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" and "Casimir Pulaski Day" (both of which I'd already heard), "Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother", "Chicago", and the oddly-named (though by no means unique in this oddness) "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhhh!". On that note, also boasts one of the best closing song titles that I can think of in "Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run".
I reckon that Illinois is a really good record, but I don't find it amazing or revelatory; in lots of ways, I feel similarly about it to the way I do about a comparable one from last year, Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender. It works best as a whole - even at a sprawling 74 minutes - but songs that I particularly like at the moment include "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts" and "Casimir Pulaski Day" (both of which I'd already heard), "Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother", "Chicago", and the oddly-named (though by no means unique in this oddness) "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhhh!". On that note, also boasts one of the best closing song titles that I can think of in "Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run".
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
The way in which I came to watch this one was as follows: Wei wanted to do something on Saturday night and, having discussed with Kai, proposed Little Fish and Turtles Can Fly (worthy films both, no doubt, but unlikely to be very much fun). I, wanting something a bit more fun, had a look and noticed that the Nova was running advance screenings of this first Wallace & Gromit feature-length and quickly threw its hat into the ring; fortunately, it was found acceptable by the masses. (Though I'd definitely have gotten round to watching it in the end regardless, most likely on dvd.)
Turns out that we were amongst the first people in the world to see the film, as it's not being released till October in the UK and US (not sure about elsewhere) - huzzah! (Found that out by lobbing onto the imdb and being surprised to see that it hadn't yet been rated by the requisite 5 people for an overall rating to show up; for the record, I give it 8/10.) It was just what one would hope a full-length Wallace & Gromit would be - gentle and funny and cute (getting maximum 'cute' mileage out of the bunnies) and a wee bit cheeky (Lady Tottington with the vegetables, the 'wrestling nuns' magazine), and featuring plenty of inventions, strange English fixations, bad jokes, general tweeness, and cracking claymation action sequences in which Gromit stars. Wallace and Gromit well set-off by the OTT-ness of Lady Tottington (as voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) and Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) and the usual cast of mildly eccentric English village types; sci-fi spoof elements also gleefully over the top (the scene where Victor and the vicar's conversation is ostentatiously punctuated by the storm, say). Needless to say, a minor pleasure, and assisted by my being in a receptive mood, but a nice way to spend a Saturday night.
The 'Madagascar penguins' short shown before was also v. good. "Blend! Blend!"
Turns out that we were amongst the first people in the world to see the film, as it's not being released till October in the UK and US (not sure about elsewhere) - huzzah! (Found that out by lobbing onto the imdb and being surprised to see that it hadn't yet been rated by the requisite 5 people for an overall rating to show up; for the record, I give it 8/10.) It was just what one would hope a full-length Wallace & Gromit would be - gentle and funny and cute (getting maximum 'cute' mileage out of the bunnies) and a wee bit cheeky (Lady Tottington with the vegetables, the 'wrestling nuns' magazine), and featuring plenty of inventions, strange English fixations, bad jokes, general tweeness, and cracking claymation action sequences in which Gromit stars. Wallace and Gromit well set-off by the OTT-ness of Lady Tottington (as voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) and Victor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) and the usual cast of mildly eccentric English village types; sci-fi spoof elements also gleefully over the top (the scene where Victor and the vicar's conversation is ostentatiously punctuated by the storm, say). Needless to say, a minor pleasure, and assisted by my being in a receptive mood, but a nice way to spend a Saturday night.
The 'Madagascar penguins' short shown before was also v. good. "Blend! Blend!"
Neil Young - Tonight's The Night
Once I got used to this one - which took a few listens - I quite liked it, but I haven't really gotten into the album. Despite that, it has the Neil Young trick of making me want to listen to it repeatedly (perhaps more reflective of my current state of mind than anything else - although I don't think so, actually)...all of the songs are kind of 'good in a way', but "Tired Eyes" is probably my favourite. Feels like an album that needs to be lived with, and perhaps discovered at some later, opportune date (though a time that was opportune for discovering this album might well not be a time opportune for anything else, except gloom).
Friday, September 09, 2005
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack
More recurrent figures on this soundtrack. Most obviously, Jon Brion, who grows increasingly ubiquitous - I've known him through work with Aimee Mann (and on Magnolia sdtk), also recently saw him pop up on a Marianne Faithfull record, and then recognised his style on Punch-Drunk Love (aided by the P T Anderson connection). Also, the Polyphonic Spree pop up with a couple of tracks. Soundtrack as a whole is a nice listen but a little indistinct, no doubt in part owing to my not having seen the film; singing/humming "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" under my breath rather a lot.
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway
Made it through on my second attempt, having bogged down about 10 pages in on the first go, a few weeks ago. All signs really quite inauspicious but I persevered, and once I'd got my ear in for Woolf's distinctive style, I began enjoying the novel very much. The passage which first made me take notice is the description of the aeroplane's skywriting, first funny then lyrical, neither a mode which had previously been much apparent, if at all (and also, in passing, a perfectly weighted reference to the previous focus, the inscrutable motor car with its intimations of greatness):
There's a throwaway line in the introduction to this edition which, I think, captures the novel's feel: 'Airy and haunting, it is a book that matches lightness with melancholy.' It all takes place on one day in June, oriented - in flowing stream of consciousness style - around Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith (and especially the first of those), but often slides into viewing events from the perspective of other characters, sometimes just for a paragraph or two, sometimes for pages on end.
Woolf's style of writing is certainly the most striking thing about Mrs Dalloway, but I'm not sure exactly how to describe its effect. It brings a certain immediacy and intimacy, both with the inner lives of the characters (especially in the reminiscences) and with their external circumstances (ie, London of 1923), but it's also a little distancing, in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. One certainly feels for the characters, and seeing Clarissa and Peter Walsh in particular through each other's eyes brings depth and sympathy for both (and likewise their relationships with Sally Seton), as well as a sense of the quiet tragedy and pathos of their lives. Woolf handles the sadness at the edges with a really delicate touch, always filling out the picture with a sense of causes and contexts and never allowing the regrets and wistfulness to overly dominate.
The Septimus threads are touched by something similar. Young, shell-shocked by the war, deeply unhappy, and suffering from delusions, Septimus is set up as a contrast to the middle-aged, well-off social hostess Clarissa, who has led, by her own lights and those of the company she keeps, a full and successful life (though dissenting views are strongly, if subtly, presented by Woolf through the perspectives of Peter and Sally). But I think that Claire Tomalin is right to suggest in her introduction that (to paraphrase somewhat) the deep parallel between Septimus and Clarissa lies in their inchoate attempts to grapple with the everyday terror of life, despite the divergences in their circumstances. Taking it a bit further, this parallel really underlies the entire novel - in a sense, it's what the book is 'about', and what gives it much of its strange power to move me, which it has done.
Like, I suppose, all great literature, Mrs Dalloway is ultimately about life.
'Blaxo,' said Mrs Coates in a strained, awestricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.
'Kreemo,' murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleepwalker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater --
'That's an E,' said Mrs Bletchley --
or a dancer --
'It's toffee,' murmured Mr Bowley --
(and the car went in at the gates and nobody looked at it), and shutting off the smoke, away and away it rushed, and the smoke faded and assembled itself around the broad white shapes of the clouds.
There's a throwaway line in the introduction to this edition which, I think, captures the novel's feel: 'Airy and haunting, it is a book that matches lightness with melancholy.' It all takes place on one day in June, oriented - in flowing stream of consciousness style - around Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith (and especially the first of those), but often slides into viewing events from the perspective of other characters, sometimes just for a paragraph or two, sometimes for pages on end.
Woolf's style of writing is certainly the most striking thing about Mrs Dalloway, but I'm not sure exactly how to describe its effect. It brings a certain immediacy and intimacy, both with the inner lives of the characters (especially in the reminiscences) and with their external circumstances (ie, London of 1923), but it's also a little distancing, in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. One certainly feels for the characters, and seeing Clarissa and Peter Walsh in particular through each other's eyes brings depth and sympathy for both (and likewise their relationships with Sally Seton), as well as a sense of the quiet tragedy and pathos of their lives. Woolf handles the sadness at the edges with a really delicate touch, always filling out the picture with a sense of causes and contexts and never allowing the regrets and wistfulness to overly dominate.
The Septimus threads are touched by something similar. Young, shell-shocked by the war, deeply unhappy, and suffering from delusions, Septimus is set up as a contrast to the middle-aged, well-off social hostess Clarissa, who has led, by her own lights and those of the company she keeps, a full and successful life (though dissenting views are strongly, if subtly, presented by Woolf through the perspectives of Peter and Sally). But I think that Claire Tomalin is right to suggest in her introduction that (to paraphrase somewhat) the deep parallel between Septimus and Clarissa lies in their inchoate attempts to grapple with the everyday terror of life, despite the divergences in their circumstances. Taking it a bit further, this parallel really underlies the entire novel - in a sense, it's what the book is 'about', and what gives it much of its strange power to move me, which it has done.
Like, I suppose, all great literature, Mrs Dalloway is ultimately about life.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Swimming Pool
One who I forgot to mention in my list of film-related people, but who would definitely fit into the 'like rather a lot but am nonetheless quite ambivalent towards' category, is François Ozon. I always enjoy his films, but am also always unsettled by them - by the dark undercurrents that run through them. 8 Femmes was kitsch, hyper-real, lovely and weird; Criminal Lovers was scary; See The Sea was nothing short of horrifying. With those latter two, at least, there's a great deal of psychology, and Ozon brings some ordinarily submerged things to the surface; maybe one of the most unnerving things about his films is that one always senses (and, having watched one or two in their entirety, learns) that he's a director with no compunctions about following through with the most troubling of his suggestions.
In that last sense, Swimming Pool was a positive relief, for its ending and resolution is much nicer than I'd feared. It inverted my expectations at least twice - once when it took the turn away from the 'repressed English writer..."Sarah wants to swim but it's too dirty for her"...experiences sexual reawakening after encounter with liberated younger woman' narrative expectation it'd set up, and then again with the closing clue as to what had gone before - and the way that it does this adds another dimension to the array of symbolic and verbal clues which form the main substance of the film, overlaying a new perspective through which to understand them. (It also provides a new angle to look at the coolness and reserve with which the whole is presented while throwing into sharper highlight the strong eroticism which runs through it.) So yep, this is a good one.
In that last sense, Swimming Pool was a positive relief, for its ending and resolution is much nicer than I'd feared. It inverted my expectations at least twice - once when it took the turn away from the 'repressed English writer..."Sarah wants to swim but it's too dirty for her"...experiences sexual reawakening after encounter with liberated younger woman' narrative expectation it'd set up, and then again with the closing clue as to what had gone before - and the way that it does this adds another dimension to the array of symbolic and verbal clues which form the main substance of the film, overlaying a new perspective through which to understand them. (It also provides a new angle to look at the coolness and reserve with which the whole is presented while throwing into sharper highlight the strong eroticism which runs through it.) So yep, this is a good one.
Martha Argerich - Début Recital (Chopin/Brahms/Liszt/Ravel/Prokofiev) / Liszt: Sonata in B Minor
One advantage of: (a) refusing to celebrate one's birthday; and (b) having an array of scattered friends whom one doesn't always see all that often, is that birthday presents trickle in for weeks and sometimes months after the date itself. So, this, from Laura. Quite a bit outside my usual listening horizon - generally when I listen to 'classical' (which isn't that often in the first place), it's either symphonic or in the fairly contemporary, minimalistic or minimalist-influenced style of Pärt, etc, as opposed to solo piano music like this) but I like it, particularly the Prokofiev ("Toccata op. 11", if anyone's keeping track). Apparently this (DG) recording is quite legendary, but of course that doesn't mean much to me in a direct sense...
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Zuma
Lately, I've been spending a lot of time walking around and listening to Neil Young, so it seemed a good idea to raid David's collection and listen to more of Young's back catalogue. Zuma is basically Neil Young-styled, often lovelorn rock - towards the introspective and woozy end of the 'rock' part of the spectrum - and I like it heaps. Hearing "Cortez The Killer" in context has brought home the song's greatness; also its positioning as the penultimate song (with the closer, "Through My Sails", being a short one) tends to act as a hook for multiple listens to the album as a whole.
On that subject, Zuma seems to have, intentionally or otherwise, a symmetry to it: nine songs; 1 and 9 are short at only about two and a half minutes each; 2 and 8 are easily the longest songs on the album, both slow-burning epics (#2, "Danger Bird", is the other that I particularly like apart from "Cortez The Killer"); 3 and 7 are three-and-a half to four minute pieces; 4 and 6 are three to three-and-a-half minute ones; 5 is pretty much a flat three minutes. Unfortunately for the theory, though, there's no obvious musical or lyrical mirroring going on apart from in the lengths of the songs...
On that subject, Zuma seems to have, intentionally or otherwise, a symmetry to it: nine songs; 1 and 9 are short at only about two and a half minutes each; 2 and 8 are easily the longest songs on the album, both slow-burning epics (#2, "Danger Bird", is the other that I particularly like apart from "Cortez The Killer"); 3 and 7 are three-and-a half to four minute pieces; 4 and 6 are three to three-and-a-half minute ones; 5 is pretty much a flat three minutes. Unfortunately for the theory, though, there's no obvious musical or lyrical mirroring going on apart from in the lengths of the songs...
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Shaolin Soccer
Again, pretty funny and filled with a goodly amount of ridiculousness, though I think I must've seen the cut version. I enjoyed Kung Fu Hustle more, though - perhaps two such films in the space of...what, two or three weeks?...is one too many for maximum enjoyment.
Powderfinger - Vulture Street
Despite the massive space in my musical association landscape occupied by Powderfinger, I never felt any urgency about listening to this album; I was surprised to realise that it came out all the way back in 2003. A large part of that lack of haste was attributable to the vibe I'd picked up that Vulture Street was a bit rockier, the two most 'rock' moments on Odyssey Number Five - "Like A Dog" and "We Should Be Together Now" - being my two least favourite on that previous album of theirs. Another important factor was that I've always had a suspicion that I wouldn't like Powderfinger all that much were it not for the really strong associations which their music carries for me, suggesting that listening to new stuff would be unlikely to prove especially rewarding.
Speaking of those associations, though, it's beginning to get to the time of year when they're at their strongest, so I thought it an apt time to finally check out Vulture Street. Verdict is that it's alright - not to damn it by faint praise, but it's just a solid pop-rock album, with a couple of minor highlights ("(Baby I've Got You) On My Mind", "Stumblin'") and a bunch of perfectly serviceable other songs, all benefiting from that familiar Powderfinger sound and especially Fanning's always listenable vocals. Still, even on some kind of imaginary 'level playing field', I think I would've liked Internationalist and Odyssey Number Five, and probably even Double Allergic, more than this one.
Speaking of those associations, though, it's beginning to get to the time of year when they're at their strongest, so I thought it an apt time to finally check out Vulture Street. Verdict is that it's alright - not to damn it by faint praise, but it's just a solid pop-rock album, with a couple of minor highlights ("(Baby I've Got You) On My Mind", "Stumblin'") and a bunch of perfectly serviceable other songs, all benefiting from that familiar Powderfinger sound and especially Fanning's always listenable vocals. Still, even on some kind of imaginary 'level playing field', I think I would've liked Internationalist and Odyssey Number Five, and probably even Double Allergic, more than this one.
Jackie French & Bruce Whatley - Diary of a Wombat
Hypothetical interviewer: So, what did you think?
Howard: (Laconically, like a wombat) Cute.
Howard: (Laconically, like a wombat) Cute.
Machine Translations @ Union House Courtyard, Melbourne University, Tuesday 6 September
Tuesday lunchtime, some nice-sounding music drifted into Rowden White from outside, so I drifted out to have a look; not long after I got there, the band played "She Wears A Mask", so I knew that it was Machine Translations (it's the one song of theirs that I would've recognised). On the whole, they were janglier than I'd have expected, with a bit of what Lucy S called an 'earthier' element to their sound, too (she drifted along a few minutes after I arrived). I remember liking "She Wears A Mask" at the same time as I first got into "The Way We Get By", which must've been a couple of years ago at least, probably more, and listening to Machine Translations, I could actually hear a bit of Spoon in them. Anyhow, they seem like a good band, making good use of the sunshiney outdoor vibes and unfazed by the constant lunchtime hubbub in the background and the relatively few people actually paying attention to the set. Just another thing I'll miss about university...
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Punch-Drunk Love
Gosh this is a good film, and about 100% weirder than I expected it'd be,
and,
gosh this is a weird film, and about 100% better than I expected it'd be.
Also: Adam Sandler (who would've thought it?).
Plus: Emily Watson (bonus!).
So I felt that there was a bit of the flavour of the Burned Children of America stories to Punch-Drunk Love - I was getting an A M Homes vibe while watching it (though I'm no longer sure how accurate that is), and maybe a wee bit of DeLillo (though that was mostly the hyper-real supermarket kitsch, I think). I was sitting there actually physically squirming with discomfort at points (the party scene, say) but also found myself laughing out loud, sometimes at the same points at which I was feeling most uncomfortable. For me, the film didn't really take off until Barry's sister (who most amusingly reminded me of someone who I'm not going to name here) and Lena visited the warehouse which doubles as Barry's office, and the romance really took centre stage, but from there, I was held suspended in a state of constant aghastness and enjoyment. It's pretty dark, but also very sweet.
Plus, at some point, about when "He Needs Me" was playing on the soundtrack, the 'love' thing hit and made me melt inside and feel a little wistful in the way that a good cinematic love story always will...
And at the end, I was touched. I'm pretty sure that I had a silly smile on my face as the credits rolled. I know that I felt a bit light-headed and off-balance for a while afterwards. Absurd, really. But some kind of wonderful.
and,
gosh this is a weird film, and about 100% better than I expected it'd be.
Also: Adam Sandler (who would've thought it?).
Plus: Emily Watson (bonus!).
So I felt that there was a bit of the flavour of the Burned Children of America stories to Punch-Drunk Love - I was getting an A M Homes vibe while watching it (though I'm no longer sure how accurate that is), and maybe a wee bit of DeLillo (though that was mostly the hyper-real supermarket kitsch, I think). I was sitting there actually physically squirming with discomfort at points (the party scene, say) but also found myself laughing out loud, sometimes at the same points at which I was feeling most uncomfortable. For me, the film didn't really take off until Barry's sister (who most amusingly reminded me of someone who I'm not going to name here) and Lena visited the warehouse which doubles as Barry's office, and the romance really took centre stage, but from there, I was held suspended in a state of constant aghastness and enjoyment. It's pretty dark, but also very sweet.
Plus, at some point, about when "He Needs Me" was playing on the soundtrack, the 'love' thing hit and made me melt inside and feel a little wistful in the way that a good cinematic love story always will...
And at the end, I was touched. I'm pretty sure that I had a silly smile on my face as the credits rolled. I know that I felt a bit light-headed and off-balance for a while afterwards. Absurd, really. But some kind of wonderful.
Nick Hornby - The Polysyllabic Spree
Nick Hornby is another of those literary-cultural figures who annoys me almost as much as I like him (well, he probably annoys me a bit more than I like him, as to which, see below). The starting point was High Fidelity the film, which I enjoyed very much and in the course of which I found myself strongly identifying with both Rob (John Cusack) and Charlie (Catherine Zeta Jones) - an unusual duo for one person to see a great deal of themselves in, I dare say. Then, I read the book and enjoyed it in a lukewarm way, which was, I think, mostly the fault of the film, which did such a good job of reproducing the tone and flavour of the book itself. The only other thing I've read of Hornby's since was that 32 Song book (I'm not sure if I have the number right), and I think that it's with that one that it may have gone sour for me - while I was impressed by his choices, I have a feeling that I also took against his writerly persona as expressed in those miniature essays.
I'd browsed a bit of The Polysyllabic Spree in a bookstore a while ago, and not been unduly impressed, but in the interests of procrastination was still willing to borrow it from the library today and skim/read it on the way home and into the early evening. It's a collection of essays tracking the books that Hornby (a) bought and (b) read (with considerable disparity between (a) and (b)) from month to month, written in very much the Hornby style and so replete with asides about soccer ('football'), his family and the rest of his life.
What he has to say about the various books that he does read, and fail to read, is often diverting, but somehow never substantial (which is, to be fair, not really the intention). The little digressions are amusing enough, but never particularly profound (again, not the point). Also, while I'm doing my best to be scrupulously fair, I've gotta say that I haven't read most of the books mentioned in the essays. But then again, Hornby doesn't make me particularly want to read any of them, even when he's heaping praise.
The way that the people who run the magazine in which the essays were originally published, Believer, are characterised as a constantly changing number of "chillingly ecstatic" robe-wearing literary equivalents to the Polyphonic Spree is cute, but (one paragraph about Chekhov's strange obsession with the sound of pissing aside) the only really funny thing about the book. It's not that Hornby takes himself too seriously (except insofar as he takes himself too seriously as someone who doesn't take himself too seriously, which he does quite a lot, with predictably mixed results) but something about his persona-as-writer (which, not coincidentally, includes his persona-as-person) just rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why. Maybe there's some kind of half-buried snobbery at work. Or maybe I just suspect that he's not really as hip as he'd like us to think (while affecting not to think himself hip at all, which is part of the whole thing, natch), nor as nice/unpretentiously intellectual/etc...I don't think I've ever had the experience of disliking someone I've met because they possessed character traits similar to those which I disliked in myself, but maybe (only maybe!) the principle works for me in relation to figures such as Hornby.
I'd browsed a bit of The Polysyllabic Spree in a bookstore a while ago, and not been unduly impressed, but in the interests of procrastination was still willing to borrow it from the library today and skim/read it on the way home and into the early evening. It's a collection of essays tracking the books that Hornby (a) bought and (b) read (with considerable disparity between (a) and (b)) from month to month, written in very much the Hornby style and so replete with asides about soccer ('football'), his family and the rest of his life.
What he has to say about the various books that he does read, and fail to read, is often diverting, but somehow never substantial (which is, to be fair, not really the intention). The little digressions are amusing enough, but never particularly profound (again, not the point). Also, while I'm doing my best to be scrupulously fair, I've gotta say that I haven't read most of the books mentioned in the essays. But then again, Hornby doesn't make me particularly want to read any of them, even when he's heaping praise.
The way that the people who run the magazine in which the essays were originally published, Believer, are characterised as a constantly changing number of "chillingly ecstatic" robe-wearing literary equivalents to the Polyphonic Spree is cute, but (one paragraph about Chekhov's strange obsession with the sound of pissing aside) the only really funny thing about the book. It's not that Hornby takes himself too seriously (except insofar as he takes himself too seriously as someone who doesn't take himself too seriously, which he does quite a lot, with predictably mixed results) but something about his persona-as-writer (which, not coincidentally, includes his persona-as-person) just rubs me the wrong way. I don't know why. Maybe there's some kind of half-buried snobbery at work. Or maybe I just suspect that he's not really as hip as he'd like us to think (while affecting not to think himself hip at all, which is part of the whole thing, natch), nor as nice/unpretentiously intellectual/etc...I don't think I've ever had the experience of disliking someone I've met because they possessed character traits similar to those which I disliked in myself, but maybe (only maybe!) the principle works for me in relation to figures such as Hornby.
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: World's End
Another, again making the centrality of stories to these books quite explicit. I'm realising, as I work my way through these in an order which is pretty close to random, how few of the comics/volumes are concerned with the central narrative of the series, and the richness of the intertwining of threads from the various minor storylines and characters. I like these ones rather a lot, certainly more than those collected in Fables and Reflections.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Watched the 'extended dvd version', meaning that you get an extra 48 minutes and the 'approximate running time' is given as 240 minutes (you do the math - that's a large chunk out of one's day). I saw this once on the big screen, and maybe once since on dvd (the cinematic release version again, if so), and it's still a bit breathtaking on this second or third viewing. I'm not really enough of a trainspotter to have picked all of the new footage; the only extended sequence which really stood out was the extra stuff in the city of the dead. Again, much gratitude is due to Peter Jackson for doing this so well.
Richard Flanagan - Gould's Book of Fish
Another contemporary historical fiction, though not a uni-related one. Yee Fui foisted the book on me, mainly (I think) because of my tendency to put 'goldfish' and 'philosophy' in the same sentence - or at least closely adjacent ones - though no doubt also partly because she thought I might enjoy it! It starts off well, but somewhere along the line, it just lost me a little bit, and while I spent a lot of time enjoying and being amused by the quirkiness and craziness (the 'conversations' with the King, for example), and also admiring the craft and representation of history/fiction (the way things circle back and forth, and endings are beginnings are endings and so on), and also being impressed by the audacity of the book and what it attempts (not just its metafictionality, but also the way it works the 'fish' theme), it didn't captivate me in the way that I'd anticipated and I ended up liking rather than loving it.
There are, I think, a few reasons for this response. First, I often find it hard to get past this kind of colloquial language - it hurts me to see ampersands on the page rather than 'and's, and I rarely enjoy reading about shit, piss and other such things (and especially in those words - I can be a bit of a prude about some things, especially when it comes to language). Still, that wouldn't have been a killing blow in itself. Second, I probably didn't read it under ideal circumstances. With the business end of the academic year increasingly looming, this was to be the last substantial non-study reading I was to tackle for a while, and even now it was read in a fairly fragmentary way, meaning that I've probably missed lots of the nuances as well as some of the bigger picture. Third - and this was a bit of a death-blow to my chances of really taking Gould's to heart - despite the distracted nature of my reading, I saw the direction that the book was taking very, very early, so that its subsequent metafictional/historiographical moves came as no kind of revelation but more as 'oh, is that all? I knew that already' type ticking-off of points.
Still, all of that quibbling notwithstanding, my basic reaction of the book is a positive one. It appeals to me on a lot of levels, not least that of being easy to read and hence a fun journey in many respects (which goes some way to making up for my having guessed the eventual destination and many of the signposts along the way all too early). And, as I said, I admire the craft that has gone into its writing, and would reckon it to be, all told, definitely a success. But it wasn't quite the right book for me at this time, and probably there's never been a time in my life at which it would have been right (commingling of fish and philosophy notwithstanding!).
Gould's also made me think that postmodernism may very well be the literary dominant at present, at least in a thematic (as opposed to enacting, or embodying, or something more substantive) fashion (another caveat being that I'm here using 'literary' quite narrowly) - it seems the norm for literature these days to be overtly and self-consciously concerned with itself (language, writing, fiction, etc), even if most examples don't take it as far as Fowles, say, or Pynchon (or, for that matter, Richard Flanagan). Of course, the problem with talking about postmodernism in these terms is that such talk tends, of its nature, to illegitimately flatten out the very idea and reduce it to formal, stylistic elements.
There are, I think, a few reasons for this response. First, I often find it hard to get past this kind of colloquial language - it hurts me to see ampersands on the page rather than 'and's, and I rarely enjoy reading about shit, piss and other such things (and especially in those words - I can be a bit of a prude about some things, especially when it comes to language). Still, that wouldn't have been a killing blow in itself. Second, I probably didn't read it under ideal circumstances. With the business end of the academic year increasingly looming, this was to be the last substantial non-study reading I was to tackle for a while, and even now it was read in a fairly fragmentary way, meaning that I've probably missed lots of the nuances as well as some of the bigger picture. Third - and this was a bit of a death-blow to my chances of really taking Gould's to heart - despite the distracted nature of my reading, I saw the direction that the book was taking very, very early, so that its subsequent metafictional/historiographical moves came as no kind of revelation but more as 'oh, is that all? I knew that already' type ticking-off of points.
Still, all of that quibbling notwithstanding, my basic reaction of the book is a positive one. It appeals to me on a lot of levels, not least that of being easy to read and hence a fun journey in many respects (which goes some way to making up for my having guessed the eventual destination and many of the signposts along the way all too early). And, as I said, I admire the craft that has gone into its writing, and would reckon it to be, all told, definitely a success. But it wasn't quite the right book for me at this time, and probably there's never been a time in my life at which it would have been right (commingling of fish and philosophy notwithstanding!).
Gould's also made me think that postmodernism may very well be the literary dominant at present, at least in a thematic (as opposed to enacting, or embodying, or something more substantive) fashion (another caveat being that I'm here using 'literary' quite narrowly) - it seems the norm for literature these days to be overtly and self-consciously concerned with itself (language, writing, fiction, etc), even if most examples don't take it as far as Fowles, say, or Pynchon (or, for that matter, Richard Flanagan). Of course, the problem with talking about postmodernism in these terms is that such talk tends, of its nature, to illegitimately flatten out the very idea and reduce it to formal, stylistic elements.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Goldfrapp - Supernature
With plenty of shimmy, sparkle and stomp, Goldfrapp are back, and in delicious style. To start at the beginning: the lead single, "Ooh La La", hadn't really grabbed me when I'd heard it on the radio/website, but in context as the opening track on the album, it was immediately about 150% better (which is strange given that, as the first track, it didn't yet have any album-related context to speak of - perhaps the lusciousness of the cd packaging had something to do with that, but more likely it was the anticipation of what was to come...listening to it loud and with a decent amount of bass probably helped, too). If it's not already apparent, I hoped for - and pretty much expected - great things of Supernature.
As it happens, "Ooh La La" isn't one of the best songs on the album, but it does provide a pretty reasonable index of where the record's at as a whole; Supernature strikes me as like Black Cherry, but more so. The disco and electro-glam elements are ramped up even higher, the beats are a bit harder, and the singing of Alison Goldfrapp still more very - ever alluring, from dramatic, swooping trills to dark-eyed, mewling sighs through the coy, breathy style in which she carries most of the melodies. For mine, the high points come near the end, in "Koko" and "Satin Chic", but really, all that sets them apart is that they're even more deliriously sweet and darkly pulsating than the rest.
So, another treat from this too-fabulous duo. I can never decide whether I like Felt Mountain or Black Cherry better, and while it's early days yet, I have a feeling that Supernature is in every way their equal.
As it happens, "Ooh La La" isn't one of the best songs on the album, but it does provide a pretty reasonable index of where the record's at as a whole; Supernature strikes me as like Black Cherry, but more so. The disco and electro-glam elements are ramped up even higher, the beats are a bit harder, and the singing of Alison Goldfrapp still more very - ever alluring, from dramatic, swooping trills to dark-eyed, mewling sighs through the coy, breathy style in which she carries most of the melodies. For mine, the high points come near the end, in "Koko" and "Satin Chic", but really, all that sets them apart is that they're even more deliriously sweet and darkly pulsating than the rest.
So, another treat from this too-fabulous duo. I can never decide whether I like Felt Mountain or Black Cherry better, and while it's early days yet, I have a feeling that Supernature is in every way their equal.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Lucinda Williams - Live @ The Fillmore
Owing to the cricket happening on the other side of the world, I found myself watching Letterman late one night a few weeks ago. As it happened, Lucinda Williams was on that night, and while I enjoyed it, I thought that if I hadn't already been a fan, there was a chance that I would've hated the performance. She did "Changed The Locks", which is a good song, but, as Williams comments in her notes to the album from which it came, it's also a song without a bridge or a refrain; moreover, her singing was basically a rough, grinding, ragged growl. So I had some idea as to how this live cd might sound.
Actually, I was torn between buying this and the live dvd which is in stores at present. The obvious advantage of the cd is that it's portable - I can listen to it in my room, on my discman, in the car, and so on. Additionally, I'm not one who generally gets much out of watching recordings of musicians' performances. But the big 'plus' in favour of the dvd was that its track list is skewed towards Car Wheels, whereas Live @ The Fillmore is very much weighted towards cuts from World Without Tears, which is my least favourite of the Williams albums I've listened to. In fact, across this double cd set, near the whole of World Without Tears gets a run; most of the other songs are from Essence, with only "Changed The Locks", "I Lost It", "Pineola" and "Joy" from the earlier recordings.
Having gone ahead and gotten the Fillmore cd, I'm pulled in two directions in my response to it. On the one hand, it's good simply in that it's Lucinda, giving her songs a different complexion. And the roughness of her singing enhances its expressiveness (the straining, gravelly vocal on "Blue" and the cracked notes on "Changed The Locks" are prime examples) while also giving it a feel of authenticity. But, on the other hand, I'd have enjoyed it much more were it not so strongly slanted towards World Without Tears. And while the voice is less cleaned-up than on the studio versions, and the instrumentation a bit more immediate, all giving the live cuts quite a different feel from their studio counterparts, I don't feel that these interpretations take me anyplace new with the songs (at least not when listened to on cd, as opposed to actually live).
Still, ultimately the Lucinda factor outweighs all else, and these are such great songs, and it's different enough from the familiar album recordings, so it's all good.
* * *
A brief comment on Lucinda Williams-listening more generally. I still haven't got around to buying her first two albums, Ramblin' On My Mind and Happy Woman Blues (I've been a bit money conscious lately), but lately my preferences have definitely shifted to the earlier end of her back catalogue. World Without Tears never really struck me, and while I still find the highlights of Essence - "Steal Your Love", "Out of Touch", and "Essence" in particular, as well as a couple of the ballads like "Blue" - amazing, I don't have any hesitation in rating Car Wheels as her best, and these days listen to Sweet Old World, which I'd initially found underwhelming, more than any other (Lucinda Williams I liked from the start).
Actually, I was torn between buying this and the live dvd which is in stores at present. The obvious advantage of the cd is that it's portable - I can listen to it in my room, on my discman, in the car, and so on. Additionally, I'm not one who generally gets much out of watching recordings of musicians' performances. But the big 'plus' in favour of the dvd was that its track list is skewed towards Car Wheels, whereas Live @ The Fillmore is very much weighted towards cuts from World Without Tears, which is my least favourite of the Williams albums I've listened to. In fact, across this double cd set, near the whole of World Without Tears gets a run; most of the other songs are from Essence, with only "Changed The Locks", "I Lost It", "Pineola" and "Joy" from the earlier recordings.
Having gone ahead and gotten the Fillmore cd, I'm pulled in two directions in my response to it. On the one hand, it's good simply in that it's Lucinda, giving her songs a different complexion. And the roughness of her singing enhances its expressiveness (the straining, gravelly vocal on "Blue" and the cracked notes on "Changed The Locks" are prime examples) while also giving it a feel of authenticity. But, on the other hand, I'd have enjoyed it much more were it not so strongly slanted towards World Without Tears. And while the voice is less cleaned-up than on the studio versions, and the instrumentation a bit more immediate, all giving the live cuts quite a different feel from their studio counterparts, I don't feel that these interpretations take me anyplace new with the songs (at least not when listened to on cd, as opposed to actually live).
Still, ultimately the Lucinda factor outweighs all else, and these are such great songs, and it's different enough from the familiar album recordings, so it's all good.
* * *
A brief comment on Lucinda Williams-listening more generally. I still haven't got around to buying her first two albums, Ramblin' On My Mind and Happy Woman Blues (I've been a bit money conscious lately), but lately my preferences have definitely shifted to the earlier end of her back catalogue. World Without Tears never really struck me, and while I still find the highlights of Essence - "Steal Your Love", "Out of Touch", and "Essence" in particular, as well as a couple of the ballads like "Blue" - amazing, I don't have any hesitation in rating Car Wheels as her best, and these days listen to Sweet Old World, which I'd initially found underwhelming, more than any other (Lucinda Williams I liked from the start).
John Coltrane - Soultrane
Jazz hasn't ever been a big part of my life, but I've always tended to like Coltrane when he's cropped up (in cars, at parties, etc). But basically I haven't got the ear for jazz, and it doesn't normally speak to me, so while I like this record well enough, for me it's pleasant but little more.
On a side note, I don't think I've ever known anyone who really liked jazz (as opposed to vaguely, politely enjoying it from time to time) who I really liked.
On a side note, I don't think I've ever known anyone who really liked jazz (as opposed to vaguely, politely enjoying it from time to time) who I really liked.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
A small affirmation
Today, caught up with Tamara for the first time in a while, and she presented me with a copy of the Zadie Smith volume from the Penguin birthday series. Unfortunately, of course, I already owned it, but I appreciated the thought, not only insofar as it's always nice to receive gifts (it's beside the point that circumstance caused me to spurn this one!) but also because it reminded me of the delicate but sharp happiness and sense of rightness and reassurance that comes of having friends who share my tastes and who, in some contingent-partial-illusory-etc but nonetheless real sense, Understand things. I noticed a while ago that these days I'm pretty well off in that regard (in terms of the company I keep and friends I've kept), but often it's the little crystallisations which resonate most clearly.
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: The Doll's House
A bit weird to be reading this after several of the later volumes (especially The Kindly Ones), but it's at least made me begin to realise how thoroughly all the story-threads will eventually be woven together into a coherent whole. Obviously, it's really good (whee!).
Jorge Luis Borges - The Mirror of Ink
Lately, thoughts of loss and absences have been much on my mind. Feeding into these have been the bits and pieces of Heidegger which have started to sink in, hearing about the Japanese aesthetic concept of 'mono no aware' (expressing the connection between our experiences of beauty, sorrow and transience), the 'Nietzsche and the fragment' presentation in the following week's philo honours seminar, the turning of the seasons, and probably several other things, too, not least general melancholy. In light of that, "The Witness", which appears in this slim collection of seven of Borges' short stories, particularly resonated. It's just a fragment, really, a shard from some strange mirror, and its central idea is this: "Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested."
These themes, though - loss, absence, spaces, infinites - are woven through all of the stories here. They're often unsettling, probably because they expose the gaps yawning just beneath the contingent sets of constructions which we call the world - the one which I found myself most troubled by was "Blue Tigers", in which stones multiply and divide ceaselessly without any regard to order or pattern, a "dreadful miracle" in which the "monstrousness" of the stones proves that the universe can tolerate disorder. Definitely need to read more Borges (and maybe learn how to pronounce his surname somewhere along the line, too).
These themes, though - loss, absence, spaces, infinites - are woven through all of the stories here. They're often unsettling, probably because they expose the gaps yawning just beneath the contingent sets of constructions which we call the world - the one which I found myself most troubled by was "Blue Tigers", in which stones multiply and divide ceaselessly without any regard to order or pattern, a "dreadful miracle" in which the "monstrousness" of the stones proves that the universe can tolerate disorder. Definitely need to read more Borges (and maybe learn how to pronounce his surname somewhere along the line, too).
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Janet Evanovich - One for the Money
Kim recommended this in passing a while back - an unusual one coming from her insofar as Evanovich is a genre writer. But the thing is that her central character and narrator, Stephanie Plum, is a wonderful creation - she's a tough, no nonsense, but all too fallible dame, and immensely likeable. Reminds me a bit of Bridget Jones at times, parallels including:
- a tendency to end up in undignified situations (amongst other things, Plum finds herself crouched under a bush for most of a rainy night, handcuffed naked to her shower rail, and scrabbling around for a set of car keys in a rubbish dumpster)
- a circle of eccentric colleagues, friends and family
- their clipped, somewhat arch tone of narration
- a penchant for exhortations towards self-improvement.
But then again, I seem to have become worryingly fixated upon that latter as a reference point at some point in the last few years, and anyway they're really not very similar - Plum's much less comfortably middle-class and preoccupied by relationship issues than Fielding's creation, and it's difficult to imagine Jones rubbing shoulders with the assorted low-lives, criminals and bottom-feeders who make up Plum's milieu, or tackling the profession of bounty hunting with such stumbling elan...
The writing is crisp and sharp, and often very funny if occasionally just slightly too flip; likewise the dialogue. (From early in the novel: "The clock on the dash told me I was seven minutes late, and the urge to scream told me I was home.") Pace is rapid; pages fly by. A good 'un.
- a tendency to end up in undignified situations (amongst other things, Plum finds herself crouched under a bush for most of a rainy night, handcuffed naked to her shower rail, and scrabbling around for a set of car keys in a rubbish dumpster)
- a circle of eccentric colleagues, friends and family
- their clipped, somewhat arch tone of narration
- a penchant for exhortations towards self-improvement.
But then again, I seem to have become worryingly fixated upon that latter as a reference point at some point in the last few years, and anyway they're really not very similar - Plum's much less comfortably middle-class and preoccupied by relationship issues than Fielding's creation, and it's difficult to imagine Jones rubbing shoulders with the assorted low-lives, criminals and bottom-feeders who make up Plum's milieu, or tackling the profession of bounty hunting with such stumbling elan...
The writing is crisp and sharp, and often very funny if occasionally just slightly too flip; likewise the dialogue. (From early in the novel: "The clock on the dash told me I was seven minutes late, and the urge to scream told me I was home.") Pace is rapid; pages fly by. A good 'un.
Nina Gordon - Tonight and the Rest of My Life
Glossy, mainstream pop. For some reason, it has a vaguely euro-sounding dance pop sheen, but it's actually something of a singer-songwriter record, all songs written by Gordon herself. Anyhow, I enjoy it for about three or four songs, but then it wears off; maybe the first three or four songs are the best, or (more likely) maybe any three or four songs at any given time is my limit. None of the songs really stand out, though the title track is quite good.
Tonic - Lemon Parade
Ah, late nineties radio rock...how mediocre it was. I mean, what was the point? It didn't move you, emotionally or viscerally - most of the time, the melodies weren't worth a damn and there was no real 'rock' to speak of either (slightly hypocritical though this may seem, coming from one who considered "Lightning Crashes" to be the best song ever for several years there). I remember "If You Could Only See", but I also remember that even at the time the next couple of singles were utterly unmemorable (while I'm chasing commercial radio-based memories, not too much later on, if I have this right, came Fuel and Semisonic, both of whom at least could write some catchy tunes). So anyhow, all the more so now, almost 10 years on, hardly surprising that Lemon Parade isn't much chop.
Lists of film-related people
Some who I like a lot (without necessarily knowing much about them): Jennifer Jason Leigh, Johnny Depp, Tim Burton, Emily Watson, Sofia Coppola, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Wong Kar-Wai, Juliette Binoche.
Plus some who I like a lot, but with an asterisk (ie, I like 'em a lot, but while either (a) also kind of disliking them or (b) generally feeling ambivalent about liking them): David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Baz Luhrmann, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cary Elwes (though probably only because of the recent rewatch of The Princess Bride), Christina Ricci, Gwyneth Paltrow, Audrey Tautou, Tim Roth, Tilda Swinton (sometimes one role, even in a Hollywood blockbuster, is enough), Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Miranda Otto, Steve Buscemi.
And a few who I've liked in the past but seem to've left behind: Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Janeane Garofalo, Edward Norton (though I still think he's a brilliant actor), Gary Oldman (likewise), Christopher Walken, Lars von Trier.
Plus some who I like a lot, but with an asterisk (ie, I like 'em a lot, but while either (a) also kind of disliking them or (b) generally feeling ambivalent about liking them): David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Baz Luhrmann, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones, Cary Elwes (though probably only because of the recent rewatch of The Princess Bride), Christina Ricci, Gwyneth Paltrow, Audrey Tautou, Tim Roth, Tilda Swinton (sometimes one role, even in a Hollywood blockbuster, is enough), Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Miranda Otto, Steve Buscemi.
And a few who I've liked in the past but seem to've left behind: Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Janeane Garofalo, Edward Norton (though I still think he's a brilliant actor), Gary Oldman (likewise), Christopher Walken, Lars von Trier.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
Lately I've been wondering if I'm not in the process of experiencing a genuine shift in musical dominant away from indie and alt-rock - whether the Arcade Fire mightn't have been something of the last hurrah as far as that field went for me. If there is such a shift going on, though, I don't know where albums like Silent Alarm will fit in.
I mean, it's really rather good.
I don't mind derivativeness unless it becomes distracting or makes a record boring to listen to, neither of which is the case here. Nor could I care less whether a band or musician is part of a movement or if they've been hyped half to death by NME & co - I don't have any difficulties in dealing with the idea that musical merit isn't the main driver behind whether or not I ever hear of an artist, or how many people like them or buy their records. So, all in all, I've been pretty happy with the current so-called post-punk/new wave revival - even if I've been paying attention only incidentally - and consider it a good result that it's thrown up at least one (though probably only one) band with something of an air of greatness about them in Interpol, as well as a whole lot of fun party anthems (every second Strokes song, "Take Me Out", "House of Jealous Lovers", "Mr Brightside", "Bandages", and plenty of others as heard on the radio).
So I thought that "Banquet" was flippin' excellent - jittery-catchy, groovy-rhythmic, slightly unhinged-exciting, and ends before you want it to, so that you have to listen to it again straight away. But I didn't get enthused about Bloc Party despite all the gushing press writeups of the album and the band (not always the same thing), mainly, I guessed, because of aforementioned shift in my own horizons. Now I come to listen to the album, and find that (a) a lot of it is very banquetesque and (b) it's very good.
Hard to pick highlights, but a few (apart from "Banquet" itself) might be opening double-punch "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter", "She's Hearing Voices" (best Joy Division title that never was), and the positively pretty "So Here We Are". When the band get it right, this record flips a lot of the right switches in my head in a way that not many out and out rock bands do these days - PGMG, Interpol, maybe Spoon and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and that's about it - but still I'm not as excited about the album as much as I feel I should be. Whether this is to do with my current musical positioning, or the album itself, is, I suppose, a moot point. Still, if anyone casually backlashes against Bloc Party or Silent Alarm while I'm around, at least without a very cogent defence indeed, just watch my dust as I scathe the backlasher with a suitable amount of derision.
I mean, it's really rather good.
I don't mind derivativeness unless it becomes distracting or makes a record boring to listen to, neither of which is the case here. Nor could I care less whether a band or musician is part of a movement or if they've been hyped half to death by NME & co - I don't have any difficulties in dealing with the idea that musical merit isn't the main driver behind whether or not I ever hear of an artist, or how many people like them or buy their records. So, all in all, I've been pretty happy with the current so-called post-punk/new wave revival - even if I've been paying attention only incidentally - and consider it a good result that it's thrown up at least one (though probably only one) band with something of an air of greatness about them in Interpol, as well as a whole lot of fun party anthems (every second Strokes song, "Take Me Out", "House of Jealous Lovers", "Mr Brightside", "Bandages", and plenty of others as heard on the radio).
So I thought that "Banquet" was flippin' excellent - jittery-catchy, groovy-rhythmic, slightly unhinged-exciting, and ends before you want it to, so that you have to listen to it again straight away. But I didn't get enthused about Bloc Party despite all the gushing press writeups of the album and the band (not always the same thing), mainly, I guessed, because of aforementioned shift in my own horizons. Now I come to listen to the album, and find that (a) a lot of it is very banquetesque and (b) it's very good.
Hard to pick highlights, but a few (apart from "Banquet" itself) might be opening double-punch "Like Eating Glass" and "Helicopter", "She's Hearing Voices" (best Joy Division title that never was), and the positively pretty "So Here We Are". When the band get it right, this record flips a lot of the right switches in my head in a way that not many out and out rock bands do these days - PGMG, Interpol, maybe Spoon and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and that's about it - but still I'm not as excited about the album as much as I feel I should be. Whether this is to do with my current musical positioning, or the album itself, is, I suppose, a moot point. Still, if anyone casually backlashes against Bloc Party or Silent Alarm while I'm around, at least without a very cogent defence indeed, just watch my dust as I scathe the backlasher with a suitable amount of derision.
An incomplete list of artists about whom I know almost nothing but whose albums I would probably buy for $10, and certainly for $5
- Hem (and would probably pay considerably more if it had the songs I've heard)
- Saloon
- Slumber Party (already missed one opportunity in the past due to extreme impecuniosity and not properly appreciating their probable brilliance at the time; if opportunity knocks again, will not be found wanting)
- Sam Phillips
- Whistler ("If I Give You A Smile" is still one of the best bittersweet, gently melancholy, end-of-summer sad songs I've ever heard)
- Leona Naess (but only if it had "Charm Attack")
- Julie Miller
- Helium (is one live b-side reason enough? Yes!)
- The Autumns (but would need to have "June in Her Frost and Furs")
- The Fire Show (well, probably - but I'd definitely regret it afterwards if I didn't)
- Gloss (with some trepidation, but I'd still buy it, just in case it had even one other song as good as "Lonely in Paris")
And five brilliant albums which I've bought under precisely those conditions (all $5, I think):
1. Belly - King
2. Gersey - Hope Springs
3. Azure Ray - Hold On Love
4. Eileen Rose - Long Shot Novena
5. The Dearhunters - Red Wine & Blue
- Saloon
- Slumber Party (already missed one opportunity in the past due to extreme impecuniosity and not properly appreciating their probable brilliance at the time; if opportunity knocks again, will not be found wanting)
- Sam Phillips
- Whistler ("If I Give You A Smile" is still one of the best bittersweet, gently melancholy, end-of-summer sad songs I've ever heard)
- Leona Naess (but only if it had "Charm Attack")
- Julie Miller
- Helium (is one live b-side reason enough? Yes!)
- The Autumns (but would need to have "June in Her Frost and Furs")
- The Fire Show (well, probably - but I'd definitely regret it afterwards if I didn't)
- Gloss (with some trepidation, but I'd still buy it, just in case it had even one other song as good as "Lonely in Paris")
And five brilliant albums which I've bought under precisely those conditions (all $5, I think):
1. Belly - King
2. Gersey - Hope Springs
3. Azure Ray - Hold On Love
4. Eileen Rose - Long Shot Novena
5. The Dearhunters - Red Wine & Blue
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide (6th ed) edited by Nick Rennison
My high school library had one of those 'rock encyclopedia' type books, a thick, glossy, and at the time exhaustive-seeming tome, which I used to browse through in spare periods in those last couple of years at school, as the Cure, the Smiths, Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and various other 'old' bands increasingly imposed themselves on my musical horizons, and pop music itself grew increasingly important to me.
Anyway, I guess that this 'Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide' is kind of a literary equivalent, although with less of a sense of (intended or actual) comprehensiveness. It focuses mostly on 20th century literature (in the broad sense of the term, so that we see Tom Clancy, David Eddings, and others of their cultural-status ilk - though no J K Rowling or Helen Fielding, interestingly) but includes some notable novelists from earlier times - Defoe, Austen, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and plenty of others). Obviously I haven't read it from cover to cover, but it's fab to dip into.
It would be pointless to quibble about the selections and omissions, or to dwell on the values that these reflect - naturally enough, there's a bias towards popular literary authors, both contemporary and relatively recently past (Calvino, Kundera, Atwood, Rushdie, Murdoch, Fowles, etc), but there's also substantial representation for the popular fantasy/sf genres (sf not so surprising - Asimov, Clarke, Gibson - nor some of those at the margins, like Le Guin, but the fantasy entries tend to be blockbuster writers, though I have to say that the compilers have managed to pick all of the best ones, as far as I'm concerned - Eddings, Donaldson, Jordan, Feist...and, in a somewhat different vein, Pratchett...missing only George R R Martin, who at least gets a mention in one of the lists and, again in a slightly different vein, China Miéville). Detective fiction also well represented, which is again not so surprising nowadays.
Also pointless to remark on how many of my favourites are included, though it did make me happy to see a few whose names I wouldn't necessarily have expected to see in a selection as comparatively brief as this one, in Donna Tartt, Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami (okay, I know they're not exactly underground, but you still wouldn't confidently bet on them being the ones from the contemporary scene to turn up in a 'good reading guide' - omissions include Franzen, Eugenides, Moody and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few heavy hitters).
Actually, one of the good things about this guide is that it's not limited to author (and 'major work') entries, though they're what I've been referring to in talking about whether given authors were or were not included, and those entries do dominate the book. There are also plenty of 'startpoints' and 'read on a theme' lists (examples of the latter: 'on the edge of sanity', 'dark old houses', 'art for whose sake?', 'good and evil', 'money', etc), and some slightly longer 'pathways' (starting from a particular book - Gormenghast is one, but the paths leading from it, from what I recognised of them, weren't terribly exciting).
Gosh, how nerdy! :)
Anyway, I guess that this 'Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide' is kind of a literary equivalent, although with less of a sense of (intended or actual) comprehensiveness. It focuses mostly on 20th century literature (in the broad sense of the term, so that we see Tom Clancy, David Eddings, and others of their cultural-status ilk - though no J K Rowling or Helen Fielding, interestingly) but includes some notable novelists from earlier times - Defoe, Austen, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and plenty of others). Obviously I haven't read it from cover to cover, but it's fab to dip into.
It would be pointless to quibble about the selections and omissions, or to dwell on the values that these reflect - naturally enough, there's a bias towards popular literary authors, both contemporary and relatively recently past (Calvino, Kundera, Atwood, Rushdie, Murdoch, Fowles, etc), but there's also substantial representation for the popular fantasy/sf genres (sf not so surprising - Asimov, Clarke, Gibson - nor some of those at the margins, like Le Guin, but the fantasy entries tend to be blockbuster writers, though I have to say that the compilers have managed to pick all of the best ones, as far as I'm concerned - Eddings, Donaldson, Jordan, Feist...and, in a somewhat different vein, Pratchett...missing only George R R Martin, who at least gets a mention in one of the lists and, again in a slightly different vein, China Miéville). Detective fiction also well represented, which is again not so surprising nowadays.
Also pointless to remark on how many of my favourites are included, though it did make me happy to see a few whose names I wouldn't necessarily have expected to see in a selection as comparatively brief as this one, in Donna Tartt, Kate Atkinson and Haruki Murakami (okay, I know they're not exactly underground, but you still wouldn't confidently bet on them being the ones from the contemporary scene to turn up in a 'good reading guide' - omissions include Franzen, Eugenides, Moody and David Foster Wallace, to name just a few heavy hitters).
Actually, one of the good things about this guide is that it's not limited to author (and 'major work') entries, though they're what I've been referring to in talking about whether given authors were or were not included, and those entries do dominate the book. There are also plenty of 'startpoints' and 'read on a theme' lists (examples of the latter: 'on the edge of sanity', 'dark old houses', 'art for whose sake?', 'good and evil', 'money', etc), and some slightly longer 'pathways' (starting from a particular book - Gormenghast is one, but the paths leading from it, from what I recognised of them, weren't terribly exciting).
Gosh, how nerdy! :)
Cyndi Lauper - At Last
Unfortunately, sometimes a record turns out to be only as good as you expected it'd be likely to be (though you buy or, in this case, borrow it anyway, just on the off chance); this is one such. Thirteen songs' worth of Lauper interpreting pop classics and standards - the ones I was really curious to hear being "Walk On By", "Unchained Melody" and "My Baby Just Cares For Me" - and, well, it's just not particularly good. Quite brave to put her voice right up the front of the mix, with the instruments being mixed down low and relatively sparse in the first place anyway, and there's a bit of a torchy effect going (especially with the piano ballads, which is most of 'em), but, while I don't know what the consensus on her voice is, I find it a bit piercing, especially when she reaches for the high notes (I actually winced during my first listen to her "Walk On By"). A couple of the songs half work, amidst the thickets - but thickets most of it is. Oh well.
Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang
I'd expected that Carey's faithful reproduction of the Jerilderie letter style of prose would make this quite difficult to plow through (not that I'd read the letter before reading True History, but still...), but in fact it's a really easy read - very entertaining and (hoary old cliche this) difficult to put down. It seems most realistic, and the characters are completely believeable and human - and it's pulled forward by a strong narrative thread (informed for us as readers, of course, by our knowledge of how it's going to end - "such is life"). Having finished it, one is left with the thought that perhaps that really is how it all happened - it's convincing!
It's not that Carey appears unaware of postmodern claims regarding history, literature, narrative and so on - indeed, the textuality of the novel is foregrounded in the way that it takes place within the framing device of it being an account, collected in several parcels (with introductory notes written by some future historian), as well as the interspersal of newspaper clippings and various other figurings of the 'textual' trope. But this foregrounding functions to bolster the 'authenticity' of the central textual narrative (perhaps in the way that early novels were often set up as 'collections of papers which have fallen into the author's hands', etc - Robinson Crusoe, for example) rather than to radically throw into question its validity or legitimacy; the questioning of history and partial irony of the 'True' in the title is more a questioning of received history in its dominant form than of the possibility of History itself. And it works really well.
It's not that Carey appears unaware of postmodern claims regarding history, literature, narrative and so on - indeed, the textuality of the novel is foregrounded in the way that it takes place within the framing device of it being an account, collected in several parcels (with introductory notes written by some future historian), as well as the interspersal of newspaper clippings and various other figurings of the 'textual' trope. But this foregrounding functions to bolster the 'authenticity' of the central textual narrative (perhaps in the way that early novels were often set up as 'collections of papers which have fallen into the author's hands', etc - Robinson Crusoe, for example) rather than to radically throw into question its validity or legitimacy; the questioning of history and partial irony of the 'True' in the title is more a questioning of received history in its dominant form than of the possibility of History itself. And it works really well.
Zadie Smith - Martha and Hanwell
Two stories, "Martha, Martha" and "Hanwell in Hell", both originally published in literary mags (Granta and The New Yorker respectively), and both very English indeed in that 'hanging on in quiet desperation' sort of way. I don't think they quite work - Smith's strength is in polyglot exuberance and energy, not this comparatively joyless, drab, small-moments-of-partial-redemption-and-barely-so-at-that style. But not a dead loss, either, and far be it from me to complain simply because her attempts to stretch herself aren't 100% successful at this stage.
D M Thomas - The White Hotel
Basically read this over again in interests of class paper (delivered yesterday). Got much more out of it this time round, though still am not sure I like it all that much. Class discussion not bad, though didn't deliver me to new heights of insight either (though it would have had I not been thinking about the text reasonably intensively during the hours immediately before class)...I was happy that a fair bit of the discussion was haunted by my hand-waving in the direction of a so-called 'metaphysics of absence', too!
Monday, August 22, 2005
F Scott Fitzgerald - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
Reasons for picking this one: one part "Calling It Quits" lyric, and three or four parts The Great Gatsby being, well, great.
Response straight after reading it: hmm, it was good, but what was it all about?
Fitzgerald's world is far removed from mine - it's a world of luxury and formality, where the codes are all different - which makes it particularly difficult to make sense of his representation of a world when that representation itself seems already self-consciously encoded. So, I like the story, in its fey satirical depiction of wealth and those who possess it, but don't feel as if I properly understand it - and it's not as human as Gatsby, which diminishes my enjoyment of it.
Response straight after reading it: hmm, it was good, but what was it all about?
Fitzgerald's world is far removed from mine - it's a world of luxury and formality, where the codes are all different - which makes it particularly difficult to make sense of his representation of a world when that representation itself seems already self-consciously encoded. So, I like the story, in its fey satirical depiction of wealth and those who possess it, but don't feel as if I properly understand it - and it's not as human as Gatsby, which diminishes my enjoyment of it.
Dave Eggers - Short Short Stories
OK, OK...these are often rather good - I might need to concede a genuine, if not yet wholehearted, slide in the direction of 'Eggers good' at this point (though I haven't read You Shall Know Our Velocity yet, and it was his other long form, AHWOSG, that most vexed me even as I enjoyed it). They really are short short stories, averaging at about 400 or so words, I reckon. There are the quirky ones, which are the ones I like best ("What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes", or "Of Gretchen and de Gaulle", say). There are the vaguely Carver-esque ones ("Georgia Is Lost" being the most obvious, and one of the weaker entries; "How Long It Took" is another). Overlapping a bit with those, there are the often angry social observation ones ("A Circle Like Some Circles", "You'll Have to Save That for Another Time"). There are the political ones ("Sleep to Dreamier Sleep Be Wed" wears its sentiments a bit on its sleeve, but its heart is in the right place; "It Is Finally Time to Tell the Story" is pure and simple a joy).
For mine, there are two pieces here which rank with the 'letters to captains of industry from Steven, a dog', in the Burned Children of America anthology, as my favourite-to-date Eggers pieces of writing - "What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes" and "Weird Wife". Both are whimsical and light but come off as oddly, almost incidentally profound as well - which is a damn good trick in writing of any form.
For mine, there are two pieces here which rank with the 'letters to captains of industry from Steven, a dog', in the Burned Children of America anthology, as my favourite-to-date Eggers pieces of writing - "What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes" and "Weird Wife". Both are whimsical and light but come off as oddly, almost incidentally profound as well - which is a damn good trick in writing of any form.
Nada Surf - Let Go
Not as good as I'd hoped it might be, but about as good as I expected it to be. On the strength of "The Way You Wear Your Head" and, especially, "Inside of Love", I was willing to risk $10 on this, but I can't say that I'm surprised that they turned out to be the best songs on the album. It's quite emo in places - a genre making increasing inroads into my collection, mostly through the backdoor - and fairly Weezer-esque, too, though for the most part without the facility for tunes of that latter ("Treading Water" reminds me a bit of Cave In, not least in the not having much in the way of a tune).
Oh, and it's "making out with people I hardly know or like", not "making out with people I hardly know a lot"; oh well, the sentiment is more or less the same in the context.
Oh, and it's "making out with people I hardly know or like", not "making out with people I hardly know a lot"; oh well, the sentiment is more or less the same in the context.
Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer & Mark O'Connor - Appalachia Waltz
One of the source albums for Heartland; more quality stuff.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Kung Fu Hustle
Everything that one might hope for in a film like this - tops fight scenes, endless face-offs, uniformly clad bad guys who rush in waves to get beaten up, hilarious slapstick, a colourful ensemble of characters, high pathos, villainous villains, unlikely heroes, and even a superlatively incidental but rather sweet romance. Great fun; made me laugh plenty.
Beth Hart - Screamin' For My Supper
Not so much sub- as simply post-Alanis late 90s angsty chick rock (and you know I wouldn't use a phrase like 'chick rock' unless I really wanted to make a point), the comparison being made obvious by some none-too-occasional similarities in vocal style. There are a few good ideas in Hart's mix, but they get lost amidst the blandness of it all.
...which is possibly an overly harsh appraisal, because during the couple of times that I've spun Screamin' For My Supper, I've sometimes had the feeling that there was a bit more going on - that the album was almost breaking into something better. There are albums that I feel might well prove more rewarding if I persevered with them for a bit longer, but the fact of the matter is that life's too short (and there's too much music out there) to invest that much time in all of the records which might, but probably wouldn't, benefit from determined repeat spinning.
...which is possibly an overly harsh appraisal, because during the couple of times that I've spun Screamin' For My Supper, I've sometimes had the feeling that there was a bit more going on - that the album was almost breaking into something better. There are albums that I feel might well prove more rewarding if I persevered with them for a bit longer, but the fact of the matter is that life's too short (and there's too much music out there) to invest that much time in all of the records which might, but probably wouldn't, benefit from determined repeat spinning.
Kasey Chambers - Wayward Angel
Looking back, in some ways my liking of Kasey Chambers was an early precursor of the musical waters I've been swimming in over the last 10 or 12 months or so; coming back to her now, via this, her most recent (I think) album, I've realised that she really is very good, even with the perspective that having listened to a lot more of this kind of stuff has brought (in fact, that perspective has allowed me to better appreciate the things that set her apart).
Wayward Angel doesn't have quite the seemingly artless fluency and sweetness of The Captain and Barricades & Brickwalls, but it may well be a better record than either of those. I tend to like the songs with banjo on them ("Bluebird", "Wayward Angel", "Follow You Home"); "Like A River" also v. good. Also, it might just be me, but it seems that Chambers's voice is less distinctive (many would say 'irritating', though I've never been one of those) than I recall - whether that's something else born of this different perspective, or an actual shift in her singing style, I don't know. The singing and songwriting seems so confident - both are pushed right to the front of one's awareness and it's a testament to their strength and warmth that this foregrounding doesn't result in any kind of diminishing.
Wayward Angel doesn't have quite the seemingly artless fluency and sweetness of The Captain and Barricades & Brickwalls, but it may well be a better record than either of those. I tend to like the songs with banjo on them ("Bluebird", "Wayward Angel", "Follow You Home"); "Like A River" also v. good. Also, it might just be me, but it seems that Chambers's voice is less distinctive (many would say 'irritating', though I've never been one of those) than I recall - whether that's something else born of this different perspective, or an actual shift in her singing style, I don't know. The singing and songwriting seems so confident - both are pushed right to the front of one's awareness and it's a testament to their strength and warmth that this foregrounding doesn't result in any kind of diminishing.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
"A secret I don't even know": The Forgotten Arm, again
Although, as ever, there's plenty of other music floating around me, The Forgotten Arm has been very much the soundtrack to my last few weeks. The achingly pretty heartbrokenness of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" has kept them my favourites, but I've grown to love every song - especially, at the moment, the incongruously jaunty "I Can't Get My Head Around It" and the moody "King of the Jailhouse".
This isn't the place to rehash all the reasons why I like Mann's music so much, but one thing which struck me yesterday, walking home after uni and listening to the album, was that the specific lyrical concerns of her songs, and of those on this album in particular, often aren't particularly consonant with my own experiences and life - I mean, what do I know about co-dependent love affairs, or the helplessness of being in love with someone who I know is going to let me down? But, despite that, for me the lyrics play a large part in the brilliance of her music, and really speak to me, and I think that there are two reasons for this.
First, the literacy and evocativeness of many of the lines cause them to stand out and stick in the mind quite irrespective of the words around them ("kicking is hard, but the bottom's harder"; "and though the exit is crude, it saves me coming unglued"; "you pulled up and parked your El Dorado/we said 'hi' and kissed with some bravado"...). And second, and relatedly, Mann's songs are so well constructed that often the most memorably universal lines are placed so that they become central to the musical shape of the piece, being highlighted and repeated at key times (choruses, especially), so that the lyrical and melodic hooks often coincide: "baby, there's something wrong with me"; "that's just not the way you make me feel", "life just kind of empties out", "that's how I knew this story would break my heart"...As a result, the sadness in such lines takes on a universally resonant tone - another element of Mann's wonderful songcraft.
I still think of Bachelor No 2 as the high water mark of Mann's discography, partly because it's indefinably somehow sharper-edged and more clear-sighted, partly because it seems to both soar and ache just a bit more vividly, but mostly, I think, because it was the first of her albums that I heard - but The Forgotten Arm isn't far behind, and it's that latter which is speaking most clearly to me at the moment.
This isn't the place to rehash all the reasons why I like Mann's music so much, but one thing which struck me yesterday, walking home after uni and listening to the album, was that the specific lyrical concerns of her songs, and of those on this album in particular, often aren't particularly consonant with my own experiences and life - I mean, what do I know about co-dependent love affairs, or the helplessness of being in love with someone who I know is going to let me down? But, despite that, for me the lyrics play a large part in the brilliance of her music, and really speak to me, and I think that there are two reasons for this.
First, the literacy and evocativeness of many of the lines cause them to stand out and stick in the mind quite irrespective of the words around them ("kicking is hard, but the bottom's harder"; "and though the exit is crude, it saves me coming unglued"; "you pulled up and parked your El Dorado/we said 'hi' and kissed with some bravado"...). And second, and relatedly, Mann's songs are so well constructed that often the most memorably universal lines are placed so that they become central to the musical shape of the piece, being highlighted and repeated at key times (choruses, especially), so that the lyrical and melodic hooks often coincide: "baby, there's something wrong with me"; "that's just not the way you make me feel", "life just kind of empties out", "that's how I knew this story would break my heart"...As a result, the sadness in such lines takes on a universally resonant tone - another element of Mann's wonderful songcraft.
I still think of Bachelor No 2 as the high water mark of Mann's discography, partly because it's indefinably somehow sharper-edged and more clear-sighted, partly because it seems to both soar and ache just a bit more vividly, but mostly, I think, because it was the first of her albums that I heard - but The Forgotten Arm isn't far behind, and it's that latter which is speaking most clearly to me at the moment.
24 Hour Party People OST
Still haven't got around to watching this, mainly because it seems likely to be fairly heavily focused on the Happy Mondays (really, I don't have any good reason to dislike them, except that: (a) it's basically drug music; (b) Shaun Ryder seems like an obnoxious twit; and (c) the Black Grape album I've got on tape isn't, to be frank, any good; which, all told, is plenty reason enough). This soundtrack is a good listen, and there's no denying the number of stone cold classics it holds, but I have nearly all of the songs I like on cd already, and don't feel particularly enriched by the early house/Happy Mondays/various others making up the tracklist (though interesting to hear another Durutti Column song). Oh yes, and I could've lived without the live Moby version of "New Dawn Fades" (backed by New Order, John Frusciante and Billy Corgan, sheesh); in fairness, it's not that bad, but really, this song did not need to be covered, least of all by Moby.
Music from the motion picture Magnolia
Have actually listened to this record before, but a few years ago, before I completely fell in love with Aimee Mann. Coming back to it now, I find that I already know a lot of the songs (whether via their subsequent inclusion on Bachelor No 2 or through other channels), and have been prompted to wonder if maybe "Wise Up", and not "Save Me", is her best song (both are on this album); also, "Driving Sideways" is better than I'd recalled. (Oh yeah, and I don't know anything about Supertramp, having always had the impression that they were sort of bland middle of the road 70s pop-ites, but the two songs of theirs that are on this soundtrack are pretty good.)
I also enjoyed reading P.T. Anderson's liner notes about the relationship between Mann's music and the film; it begins, "I sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs. Like one would adapt a book for the screen, I had the concept of adapting Aimee's songs into a screenplay". Makes me want to watch Magnolia again, yo, having had mixed feelings about it the first time around (which was before I was familiar with Mann's music at all).
I also enjoyed reading P.T. Anderson's liner notes about the relationship between Mann's music and the film; it begins, "I sat down to write an adaptation of Aimee Mann songs. Like one would adapt a book for the screen, I had the concept of adapting Aimee's songs into a screenplay". Makes me want to watch Magnolia again, yo, having had mixed feelings about it the first time around (which was before I was familiar with Mann's music at all).
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
I struggled a bit with the complexity and mysticism of this one. It starts promisingly, introducing a quartet of grotesque, almost Peakean antique/secondhand book dealers and the cast of misfits and nasties whose demi-monde they inhabit, but then gets very confusing as it spins off two more major storylines, one set in early to mid nineteenth century London and tracing out a Jack the Ripper theory, many of the outlines of which were broadly familiar to me thanks to From Hell, the other following a pair of peculiar investigators in contemporary times who are trying to unravel the mystery of those Whitechapel murders. I must confess that I didn't really 'get' it. The secondary source in the subject reader made things clearer, and I'll probably return to this book at some stage (if most likely not this semester) to give it a more attentive, committed reading.
"Can't hear it on the radio": Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
A Ghost Is Born is a good album, but I'm not sure yet just how good. Sometimes I think it's right up there with Summerteeth as a truly great album, but at other times I'm more ambivalent, reckoning it to miss as often as it hits. To start with the definite hits: the opening five cuts are all really good, especially the "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" - "Muzzle of Bees" - "Hummingbird" sequence. The moody, midtempo rock atmospherics are delicately, perfectly balanced from the slow piano beginning and the sliding yet careful guitar line which cuts in at about 2 minutes in through the elegant rockisms of the rest of the album's opening run (I particularly like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)"). But I'm not so sure about the record's second half-and-a-bit, which doesn't make me feel in the same way and sometimes feels like a regression to the blandness of YHF and the one or two less distinguished moments on Summerteeth; whereas the first few tracks derive their glory from their subtlety and understatedness, these last ones can drag a bit and seem just plain uninteresting. Good to see that the band haven't lost their facility for silvery jingles - as evident in "The Late Greats" - and, to a lesser extent, "Hummingbirds", too.
Maybe this is one that needs to be lived with over an extended period of time in order to fully unfurl itself, because it does seem to take on a different hue and complexion with each listen - and especially its second half...besides, Wilco albums always grow on me gradually, to greater or lesser extents.
Maybe this is one that needs to be lived with over an extended period of time in order to fully unfurl itself, because it does seem to take on a different hue and complexion with each listen - and especially its second half...besides, Wilco albums always grow on me gradually, to greater or lesser extents.
The Princess Bride
Noticed that this was screening at the Astor the day before (Friday for Saturday) and finally got my act together to see it on the big screen. Still a joy!
Jeanette Winterson - Sexing the Cherry
Winterson is definitely a key figure in my development as a reader. She may have been the first 'literary' writer whose work I really loved, and she was definitely my very favourite author for a few years there. I'm a bit vague on the timing, but I think it must've been lateish high school or very early uni that I discovered her - maybe even in that mythical summer between school and uni. I remember giving Kim a copy of one of her books (Art & Lies, maybe), only to discover that she already knew and loved Winterson's work. I remember drifting off to sleep, ideas and images dancing before my eyes, re-reading The Passion one drowsy summer afternoon in the Alexandra gardens, under the dappled shade of a gigantic tree. I remember writing an extended appreciation of Written On The Body for my 4000 word final paper in "Reading Sexuality", even though Winterson's work didn't appear on the course at all. And I was still enough of a fan to give Daniel R a Winterson book (Gut Symmetries, I think) at some point in the gathering twilight of our doomed acquaintance...which brings us at least up to, say, mid-2002.
Somewhere along the line, though, I moved on. It was in the period before or around the time that The.Powerbook came out; I remember being utterly unexcited by the prospect of reading it, and only got round to doing so a couple of years after its initial release. At that time, I wasn't reading very much at all outside of uni-related reading (and not all that much of that, either - a real extended grey winter of discontent which stretched for a couple of years or so and still isn't hasn't properly departed), and somehow when I emerged from the non-reading period, I'd gotten over Winterson. I no longer found her work particularly profound: what had seemed such glimmering, beautiful, poetic prose now looked merely self-consciously precious; what I'd found so insightful and meaningful had come to appear distressingly trite and insubstantial. It's not that I'd actually read any of her stuff recently at that stage - but just that I'd reevaluated my impressions of old reading (always a tricky thing to do).
A few further years on now, though, and things look slightly different again. Although when I did eventually read The.Powerbook, and Lighthousekeeping too, neither inspired me, I began to wonder if perhaps the violence of my swing away from her was more due to the exaggeration caused by disillusionment in relation to something I'd rated so highly than to an honest, 'objective' appraisal of how good she is or was (a telling ambiguity).
So anyhow, I've just re-read Sexing the Cherry for this "Contemporary Historical Fictions" subject, and y'know, it isn't too bad after all. These days, I'm far better versed in the sorts of ideas to do with perception, representation, reality, being (and time), identity, gender, writing, language, and so on (though not at all regarding love, the other big one in this book and throughout her oeuvre) which are Winterson's stock in trade than I was last time round, and so I can more clearly see the derivativeness in her writing...but I can also, having pushed through that initial disillusioning realisation that her ideas weren't particularly new after all, appreciate the deftness with which she synthesises and plays with the fluidity of these concepts...and after all, even if she wasn't the first to think these things, in many cases it was Winterson who introduced me to them, opening my mind and imagination in so many ways. (It's also made me realise how heavily my own writing of that time - 2001-2002ish - was marked by Winterson's style.)
* * *
On a different note, it was interesting to read this book, with which I'm very familiar, through the particular prism of 'contemporary historical fictions' - it definitely brings different aspects of the text into the foreground. I'd had a similar experience while reading V. The seminar discussion regarding that latter was good - I enjoyed it, thought that we covered a lot of the most important aspects of Pynchon's novel, and was forced to think through and struggle to articulate some of my more intuitive and deeper responses to it. Not sure how the seminar on Sexing the Cherry will go, as I think many of its aspects will be flattened out by the focus on its historical/historiographical nature, but it should be interesting nonetheless.
Somewhere along the line, though, I moved on. It was in the period before or around the time that The.Powerbook came out; I remember being utterly unexcited by the prospect of reading it, and only got round to doing so a couple of years after its initial release. At that time, I wasn't reading very much at all outside of uni-related reading (and not all that much of that, either - a real extended grey winter of discontent which stretched for a couple of years or so and still isn't hasn't properly departed), and somehow when I emerged from the non-reading period, I'd gotten over Winterson. I no longer found her work particularly profound: what had seemed such glimmering, beautiful, poetic prose now looked merely self-consciously precious; what I'd found so insightful and meaningful had come to appear distressingly trite and insubstantial. It's not that I'd actually read any of her stuff recently at that stage - but just that I'd reevaluated my impressions of old reading (always a tricky thing to do).
A few further years on now, though, and things look slightly different again. Although when I did eventually read The.Powerbook, and Lighthousekeeping too, neither inspired me, I began to wonder if perhaps the violence of my swing away from her was more due to the exaggeration caused by disillusionment in relation to something I'd rated so highly than to an honest, 'objective' appraisal of how good she is or was (a telling ambiguity).
So anyhow, I've just re-read Sexing the Cherry for this "Contemporary Historical Fictions" subject, and y'know, it isn't too bad after all. These days, I'm far better versed in the sorts of ideas to do with perception, representation, reality, being (and time), identity, gender, writing, language, and so on (though not at all regarding love, the other big one in this book and throughout her oeuvre) which are Winterson's stock in trade than I was last time round, and so I can more clearly see the derivativeness in her writing...but I can also, having pushed through that initial disillusioning realisation that her ideas weren't particularly new after all, appreciate the deftness with which she synthesises and plays with the fluidity of these concepts...and after all, even if she wasn't the first to think these things, in many cases it was Winterson who introduced me to them, opening my mind and imagination in so many ways. (It's also made me realise how heavily my own writing of that time - 2001-2002ish - was marked by Winterson's style.)
* * *
On a different note, it was interesting to read this book, with which I'm very familiar, through the particular prism of 'contemporary historical fictions' - it definitely brings different aspects of the text into the foreground. I'd had a similar experience while reading V. The seminar discussion regarding that latter was good - I enjoyed it, thought that we covered a lot of the most important aspects of Pynchon's novel, and was forced to think through and struggle to articulate some of my more intuitive and deeper responses to it. Not sure how the seminar on Sexing the Cherry will go, as I think many of its aspects will be flattened out by the focus on its historical/historiographical nature, but it should be interesting nonetheless.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Tujiko Noriko @ the Corner Hotel, Thursday 11 August
Well, in a sense I've been anticipating this gig since the last time sweet Noriko toured (February of last year @ Ding Dong, her first time in Australia), but despite the subliminal build-up of expectation it was anything but a disappointment; in fact, a couple of hours on, I'm still floating a little bit on how good it was.
This was a concert which I was always half-inclined to attend on my own, and in the end, that's what happened (mentioned it to a few people, but they were unable to make it because of, variously, ballet, impecuniosity, and a mother's birthday); as it turned out, though, a guy from my Heidegger subject - one Adam - was there, having heard one of her songs on the radio earlier this week and decided to roll up on spec, so I had company between the sets (Lachlan was also around with some friends)...as to which, I only caught the tail end of one of the support acts, and enjoyed the seemingly at least semi-improv, somewhat Mogwai-esque post-rock/noise-type act which followed.
But obviously this was all just so much fluff to be waited on until the main event. As expected, it was just Tujiko standing up the front with her laptop and singing (simple black knit and plain dark grey skirt - a contrast to the bright pink movie star dress she was in last time); quite a short set in the end - 45 minutes, maybe? - and mostly comprised of new songs. The cute factor was high, of course, from the regular smiles, to the charmingly fumbling English as she hunted around on her laptop for the file to accompany an encore, to the basic sweetness of her singing over the top of these glitch-heavy electroscapes. But it couldn't be mainly about anything but the music, as to which: the new tracks sounded good (especially one with some more organic instrumentation and a big hip hop beat in the midsection), but the clear highlight was "White Film" - it was a joyful moment when its opening strains floated out of the sound-weave and the whole song was a delight (especially the point when the layers all dropped away to leave the simple chiming tones which ring in the album version and Tujiko gave the crowd a gorgeous smile to accompany it).
I always think of her albums as very much headphone experiences, preferably to be enjoyed at home with space and silence all around. But listening to the music loud, distorting a bit through the speakers, mixing with the background noise, and generally seeming more cacophonous, and with that too-charming singing coming directly towards through, is, while different, an equally great experience. Saw it from a good spot - right in the middle, 7 or 8 metres away if that - and thought that it was all just too wonderful for words.
This was a concert which I was always half-inclined to attend on my own, and in the end, that's what happened (mentioned it to a few people, but they were unable to make it because of, variously, ballet, impecuniosity, and a mother's birthday); as it turned out, though, a guy from my Heidegger subject - one Adam - was there, having heard one of her songs on the radio earlier this week and decided to roll up on spec, so I had company between the sets (Lachlan was also around with some friends)...as to which, I only caught the tail end of one of the support acts, and enjoyed the seemingly at least semi-improv, somewhat Mogwai-esque post-rock/noise-type act which followed.
But obviously this was all just so much fluff to be waited on until the main event. As expected, it was just Tujiko standing up the front with her laptop and singing (simple black knit and plain dark grey skirt - a contrast to the bright pink movie star dress she was in last time); quite a short set in the end - 45 minutes, maybe? - and mostly comprised of new songs. The cute factor was high, of course, from the regular smiles, to the charmingly fumbling English as she hunted around on her laptop for the file to accompany an encore, to the basic sweetness of her singing over the top of these glitch-heavy electroscapes. But it couldn't be mainly about anything but the music, as to which: the new tracks sounded good (especially one with some more organic instrumentation and a big hip hop beat in the midsection), but the clear highlight was "White Film" - it was a joyful moment when its opening strains floated out of the sound-weave and the whole song was a delight (especially the point when the layers all dropped away to leave the simple chiming tones which ring in the album version and Tujiko gave the crowd a gorgeous smile to accompany it).
I always think of her albums as very much headphone experiences, preferably to be enjoyed at home with space and silence all around. But listening to the music loud, distorting a bit through the speakers, mixing with the background noise, and generally seeming more cacophonous, and with that too-charming singing coming directly towards through, is, while different, an equally great experience. Saw it from a good spot - right in the middle, 7 or 8 metres away if that - and thought that it was all just too wonderful for words.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Toni Morrison - Beloved
Vivid and affecting, Beloved left me with a clench in my throat and the feeling that I'd just read something real. The depiction of the violence being done to black people, slaves and otherwise, in mid-to-late-19th century America caught at me and wrenched - the first time for as long as I can remember that a novel has made me feel angry and upset. I suppose that it's a tribute to Morrison's craft and technical ability that I responded so strongly to a story which is, at least on the surface, far removed from my own experience - although the period setting and dialogue could easily have acted as a distancing factor, the prose in which the novel's written is so transparent, and its characters and situations ring so true, that I was immersed in the book's universe rather than ever being pulled up short by a sense of dislocation or unfamiliarity.
I'm finding it hard to look at this book critically so soon after having finished it, so just a few thoughts:
- It achieves a good balance between the individual story and the more universal aspects...I mean that the way in which it addresses the big picture never distracts from the details of the representation of the particular narrative of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, Halle, Paul D and the rest - somehow, the broader 'themes' are necessarily present and implicit in the way that the story is told.
- Relatedly, the novel strikes me as deeply moral without being moralising.
- White people are far from demonised - see Amy, the Garners, the Bodwins...
- There's cruelty and horror, but nearly all of it takes place 'off stage', as it were, in the rememberings of various characters.
- Also, I'm not even sure that Beloved is primarily concerned with the 'African-American experience', though that's obviously central...mind you, I'm not sure what else could be said to be its 'primary' concern - the continuing effect of history in the present, perhaps, or maybe just the ties that bind more generally.
- Again, the theme of hauntedness is made literal.
- The imagery can be a little obvious - Sethe's immense urination as a second breaking of waters when Beloved returns, the naturalistic spaces which Denver and Baby Suggs make their own, the three shadows holding hands (although that last functions quite interestingly in the end) - but, perhaps because of the clarity of Morrison's vision, it works effectively nonetheless.
- The technique of anticipating subsequent elaborations on the characters' historical narratives leaves me in two minds; it's obviously deliberate, but I can't quite work out what purpose it serves...perhaps that 'past operating in the present' idea again.
A pretty substantial blow to my theory that I increasingly only enjoy novels/films with which I can personally identify!
I'm finding it hard to look at this book critically so soon after having finished it, so just a few thoughts:
- It achieves a good balance between the individual story and the more universal aspects...I mean that the way in which it addresses the big picture never distracts from the details of the representation of the particular narrative of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, Halle, Paul D and the rest - somehow, the broader 'themes' are necessarily present and implicit in the way that the story is told.
- Relatedly, the novel strikes me as deeply moral without being moralising.
- White people are far from demonised - see Amy, the Garners, the Bodwins...
- There's cruelty and horror, but nearly all of it takes place 'off stage', as it were, in the rememberings of various characters.
- Also, I'm not even sure that Beloved is primarily concerned with the 'African-American experience', though that's obviously central...mind you, I'm not sure what else could be said to be its 'primary' concern - the continuing effect of history in the present, perhaps, or maybe just the ties that bind more generally.
- Again, the theme of hauntedness is made literal.
- The imagery can be a little obvious - Sethe's immense urination as a second breaking of waters when Beloved returns, the naturalistic spaces which Denver and Baby Suggs make their own, the three shadows holding hands (although that last functions quite interestingly in the end) - but, perhaps because of the clarity of Morrison's vision, it works effectively nonetheless.
- The technique of anticipating subsequent elaborations on the characters' historical narratives leaves me in two minds; it's obviously deliberate, but I can't quite work out what purpose it serves...perhaps that 'past operating in the present' idea again.
A pretty substantial blow to my theory that I increasingly only enjoy novels/films with which I can personally identify!
Marianne Faithfull - Before the Poison
Only so-so, which is disappointing. Most of the ten songs on this record were written or co-written with Faithfull by PJ Harvey or Nick Cave (there's also one by Damon Albarn, and one co-write with Aimee Mann collaborator Jon Brion), which ought to've been a fruitful series of collaborations. But, with the exception of a couple of Nick Cave ballads - "Crazy Love" and "There Is A Ghost" - and the Albarn track, "Last Song", the results don't do it for me; the music is ominous and churning and all that jazz, but it lacks the dark, cinematic lushness of a song like "Who Will Take My Dreams Away?", always the starting point for Marianne and I.
"They're All Above Me" & "CD2004"
Two cds from David. The first is a mix cd proper; the second is a copy of David's annual compilation of music he got into over the preceding year (presumably made for his own purposes some time ago).
"They're All Above Me" is ten songs by 'David' bands and artists of various stripes...I don't think I know anyone else who's really into any one of Queens of the Stone Age, Gomez or Supergrass (though common sense and record sales tell me there must be thousands in Melbourne alone). It's neat, anyway. The common theme seems to be a kind of 'alternative mainstream' mindset and a certain jitteriness or nervous energy; how that fits with the Bosch cover is anyone's guess. I like the Sigur Ros and Beck songs ("Untitled" and "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" respectively); Supergrass's "Going Out" also good; "My Doorbell"'s not all that I recalled, but still pretty good (likewise "Generator" - but then I always preferred the Color and the Shape singles more anyway); "Low" and "Burn The Witch" are, well, a Coldplay song and a QOTSA one; I already knew "Specialist" and "78 Stone Shuffle"; and David Byrne's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is suitably Byrne-esque and so both straight and ironic, but more 'straight', I think.
I already knew most of the songs on "CD2004", many through the good offices of David himself. It's a good listen, though - mostly modern rock, all catchy. Multiple songs from Low, Antics, the Walkmen, Phantom Planet, theredsunband and Kings of Leon. My five favourite songs on the cd, in order:
1. "The Rat" - The Walkmen (I'm not entirely sold on the Walkmen, but this song is flat out great)
2. "Sound and Vision" - David Bowie (the best 'pop' song on Low)
3. "Knowitall" - Phantom Planet (a real beast of an anthem)
4. "Revolution Blues" - Neil Young (probably the best song on On The Beach)
5. "Misery Is A Butterfly" - Blonde Redhead (shimmery chilly art-pop)
"They're All Above Me" is ten songs by 'David' bands and artists of various stripes...I don't think I know anyone else who's really into any one of Queens of the Stone Age, Gomez or Supergrass (though common sense and record sales tell me there must be thousands in Melbourne alone). It's neat, anyway. The common theme seems to be a kind of 'alternative mainstream' mindset and a certain jitteriness or nervous energy; how that fits with the Bosch cover is anyone's guess. I like the Sigur Ros and Beck songs ("Untitled" and "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime" respectively); Supergrass's "Going Out" also good; "My Doorbell"'s not all that I recalled, but still pretty good (likewise "Generator" - but then I always preferred the Color and the Shape singles more anyway); "Low" and "Burn The Witch" are, well, a Coldplay song and a QOTSA one; I already knew "Specialist" and "78 Stone Shuffle"; and David Byrne's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" is suitably Byrne-esque and so both straight and ironic, but more 'straight', I think.
I already knew most of the songs on "CD2004", many through the good offices of David himself. It's a good listen, though - mostly modern rock, all catchy. Multiple songs from Low, Antics, the Walkmen, Phantom Planet, theredsunband and Kings of Leon. My five favourite songs on the cd, in order:
1. "The Rat" - The Walkmen (I'm not entirely sold on the Walkmen, but this song is flat out great)
2. "Sound and Vision" - David Bowie (the best 'pop' song on Low)
3. "Knowitall" - Phantom Planet (a real beast of an anthem)
4. "Revolution Blues" - Neil Young (probably the best song on On The Beach)
5. "Misery Is A Butterfly" - Blonde Redhead (shimmery chilly art-pop)
Neil Young - Greatest Hits
Neil Young is one of those artists who, when I'm not actually listening to his stuff, I tend to think is fairly boring and uninspiring, but whenever I do put one of his records on (I only have Harvest and On The Beach), I really, really enjoy it. (I'm particularly thinking of an end of summer melancholy evening walking down St Kilda Road, feeling really broken down and tired, listening to On The Beach and completely digging it.) And the same thing has come into play in listening to this greatest hits, much of which is new to me; the disc really hammers home how frickin great the man is. It's fiery and ragged and delicate and real - really quite incandescent.
The extended jams are great - I especially like "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Like A Hurricane" - but the more tender moments are also wonderful (I'm gradually coming round to believing that Young's original version of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" may be better than the Saint Etienne cover, which is iconic in its own right as far as I'm concerned...well, they're très different, obviously)...not that extendedness and tenderness are necessarily mutually exclusive, in principle or here in fact. Also, hearing the Harvest cuts in this context has made me reevaluate them a bit, and positively at that, realising that they're not quite so blandly middle of the road after all (finding myself singing along to "Old Man" and then - the kicker - "Heart of Gold" - was a bit of a giveaway...I already knew that "The Needle and the Damage Done" was something else).
I don't know if all great music necessarily ages well; for mine, greatness doesn't have to be 'for the ages', and greatness in the moment is greatness nonetheless. But, in any case, the music on this disc speaks pretty clearly to me.
The extended jams are great - I especially like "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Like A Hurricane" - but the more tender moments are also wonderful (I'm gradually coming round to believing that Young's original version of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" may be better than the Saint Etienne cover, which is iconic in its own right as far as I'm concerned...well, they're très different, obviously)...not that extendedness and tenderness are necessarily mutually exclusive, in principle or here in fact. Also, hearing the Harvest cuts in this context has made me reevaluate them a bit, and positively at that, realising that they're not quite so blandly middle of the road after all (finding myself singing along to "Old Man" and then - the kicker - "Heart of Gold" - was a bit of a giveaway...I already knew that "The Needle and the Damage Done" was something else).
I don't know if all great music necessarily ages well; for mine, greatness doesn't have to be 'for the ages', and greatness in the moment is greatness nonetheless. But, in any case, the music on this disc speaks pretty clearly to me.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Nelly Furtado - Folklore
From time to time, I take a mainstream pop single to heart, and "I'm Like A Bird" was one such when it hit the charts a while back; having dug out the cd single, I see that it was back in 2000...hard to believe that it was so long ago. Anyhow, Folklore was her follow up album - I haven't listened to the first - and veers quite strongly towards the 'global pop' side of things (in that respect, it recalls Arular), but isn't all that interesting. It starts off quite brightly, with banjo and mandolin tinkling away in the first couple of songs and some pleasant sung-chanted tunes, but the album doesn't really take off at any point, and the production is maybe a bit too 'top 40', giving it a glossy, homogeneous feel that doesn't do justice to Furtado's attempts to genre-hop and synthesise.
Profile II: The Best of Emmylou Harris
Another compilation, gathering recordings from 1979 to 1984. I don't know how this works, but somehow it always takes a couple of listens for me to get past Harris's voice and/or singing style in order to enjoy her music, after which that same voice and singing becomes the best part of the record (on this cd, the effect is particularly pronounced with the traditional number "Wayfaring Stranger", which has, of course, been recorded by countless others, each providing a comparison point for this version). Anyhow, I haven't really taken any of the songs on this cd to heart, but it's all eminently listenable with that voice pealing away.
Marianne Faithfull - This Little Bird
A collection of songs released by Faithfull in the sixties. Used as I am to her gravel-voiced, lower octave latter-day work, this is something of a eye-opener, recalling no one so much as Francoise Hardy, though perhaps slightly less twee and sentimental, and sometimes a bit of early Joni. While I'm not tremendously impressed, these songs do have a certain simple, twinkling charm, just touched by a little shadow - corresponding nicely with my picture of those times.
Lisa Miller - Pushover EP
Both less and more than a standard ep - less in the sense that it comes across as something like an extended single, including an album cut, an alternate take, a few live tracks and only one wholly new song, but more in the sense that it runs for some 40 minutes, and so outdistancing plenty of alleged long players. What material there is, though, falls into that vast category of 'pleasant but not exceptional'. The title track's alright, but not one of Miller's stronger singles, while the alternate version is overlong and sub-Beth Orton in style; the live cuts are uniformly solid; the cover of Gram Parson's "Hickory Wind" works, preserving the wispy melancholy of the original.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: Brief Lives
Volume 7, in which Delirium and Dream go in search of Destruction, who is revealed to be an all-round nice guy (the nicest of the seven, it seems - there's such warmth in his interactions with others, especially Barnabas). It's quite a straightforward, linear story, but the devil - and much of the joy - is in the details.
Here is a list of the reasons why I like Dream:
* He's rake-thin
* And tormented
* And self-absorbed
* And rapier-sharp
* And mysterious
* And aloof
* And somewhat frightening
* And very, very powerful
* And only vaguely accountable to others
* But, underneath it, he's really rather nice
* And when he falls in love, he falls hard
* And he has a very strong sense of responsibility
* And is driven by inner compulsions and principles
* All of which eventually dooms him.
Ah, so that's why...
Here is a list of the reasons why I like Dream:
* He's rake-thin
* And tormented
* And self-absorbed
* And rapier-sharp
* And mysterious
* And aloof
* And somewhat frightening
* And very, very powerful
* And only vaguely accountable to others
* But, underneath it, he's really rather nice
* And when he falls in love, he falls hard
* And he has a very strong sense of responsibility
* And is driven by inner compulsions and principles
* All of which eventually dooms him.
Ah, so that's why...
Kings of Leon - Youth & Young Manhood
There's always a pretty strong predisposition towards liking cds which have been gifts - the principle also operates with books, though to a lesser extent, maybe (perhaps it's just that people are more likely to give books on the basis that they've heard that it's good rather than because they've read and enjoyed it themselves) - so I approached Kings of Leon with an open mind after being given the album by Penny (in part because she's been enjoying it lately, and in part because she thought the album's title appropriate to its occasion, that being my lately passed birthday), despite not having been grabbed by the bits and pieces of their stuff that I'd heard before.
That notwithstanding, though, I still think that this is a band which is entirely solid without ever threatening to be particularly good, and all the southernisms can be a bit irritating over the course of a whole album. They're probably actually better than I think, for I've never been particularly into bluesy, four to the floor rock and roll (a brief dalliance with Led Zep in late high school excepted) - it's just not my style, and especially not now, with sweet sad tuneful stuff continuing to be what it's all about). But still, the only song on Youth & Young Manhood which particularly does it for me is "Joe's Head", which is, admittedly, pretty darn good.
That notwithstanding, though, I still think that this is a band which is entirely solid without ever threatening to be particularly good, and all the southernisms can be a bit irritating over the course of a whole album. They're probably actually better than I think, for I've never been particularly into bluesy, four to the floor rock and roll (a brief dalliance with Led Zep in late high school excepted) - it's just not my style, and especially not now, with sweet sad tuneful stuff continuing to be what it's all about). But still, the only song on Youth & Young Manhood which particularly does it for me is "Joe's Head", which is, admittedly, pretty darn good.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
"My Room Is White"
A rather mournful, distinctly after-dark mix cd from trang. Old, sad-eyed favourites from the Dirty Three ("I Really Should've Gone Out Last Night"), Bic Runga ("Without You"), Coldplay ("The Scientist"), and others; the late-night crooning of Nina Simone, Marianne Faithfull, Madeleine Peyroux and Nick Cave (PJ Harvey's "Horses in my Head" also fits well with these); a scattering of melancholy songs by girls with sweet voices; and others in a similar vein. Definitely a cd only for particular moods, but very much right for those moods.
Neil Gaiman - Death: The High Cost of Living
On the subject of likability and characters who could've been written specifically to appeal, I was thinking that one of the things about Morpheus is that everyone reading these comics is (I reckon) going to see at least a bit of themselves in him (or, possibly, vice versa). And Death, then, is like the older sister or best girl friend that everyone wants - cool, quirky, cute, a bit...well...dreamy, but with her feet firmly on the ground.
This one's sort of sweet.
This one's sort of sweet.
Bill Willingham - The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales
These ones weren't written by Gaiman himself, but I picked up the book anyway because it features, Thessaly, who's one of my favourite characters at this point (because she's a cutie, and bookish, and also because she's an incredibly powerful, thousands-of-years-old witch who kills everything that gets in her way - and, in this story, she carries a teddy bear around with her everywhere...honestly, some of these characters could have been written specifically to appeal to me...). As Willingham promises, each of the three stories (the Mervyn as secret agent one, the 'Danny Nod, heroic library assistant' one and the 'Thessaliad') is itself about stories, and they're all three of them good (the throwaway sequences at the end - 'Everything you always wanted to know about dreams...but were afraid to ask' - are also fun).
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: A Game of You & Fables and Reflections
Two more from the Sandman series proper (these are volumes 5 and 6; I've resigned myself to reading them all out of sequence). I really like A Game of You - am surprised again by how immediately likable these characters are. All of the figures in A Game of You are new to me except Thessaly (who becomes Larissa by the time of The Kindly Ones) and the Sandman himself (plus brief appearances by Nuala, Matthew and Lucien), but it takes no time at all for Gaiman to get us rooting for them, and feeling that there's an interesting back story behind the words and images actually on the page. The 'dream' characters are endearing, naturally, while also having a sort of gravitas, and the ones from the 'real' world are eminently sympathetic (and believable). And the whole 'Barbie' concept is great - y'know, like I said last time, clever.
I'd actually read Fables & Reflections before, in a library somewhere, some time. It didn't particularly impress me then, but now, having been introduced to the figures who fleetingly pass through the major storylines of these nine self-contained shorts, I appreciated the book much more, whereas large chunks of it made no sense when I didn't have the necessary context. That said, I still didn't enjoy it as much as the other Sandman I've read lately.
I'd actually read Fables & Reflections before, in a library somewhere, some time. It didn't particularly impress me then, but now, having been introduced to the figures who fleetingly pass through the major storylines of these nine self-contained shorts, I appreciated the book much more, whereas large chunks of it made no sense when I didn't have the necessary context. That said, I still didn't enjoy it as much as the other Sandman I've read lately.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Kate Grenville - The Secret River
While I quite enjoyed this book, reading it has reminded me of why I've never particularly been into historical fiction as a genre (which does, now that I come to think about it, render my choice of the subject "Contemporary Historical Fictions" slightly odd, at least when looked at from that angle). I mean, it was easy to read, there was a suitable sense of place and time, etc, etc, but still it didn't engage me on any deep level - there was no sense of 'ah' to it. I should say, though, that I didn't predict the direction that it took in the closing stanzas, and that the choices made by Genville seemed, in retrospect, to be the right ones, giving the story a sense of honesty and imbuing it with more of an allegorical character (which is, in this case, a good thing in that it's not distracting). So yeah, this is good, but I suppose I'm just a philistine, or looking for different things in literature, or both, because it doesn't excite me.
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