Friday, August 10, 2012
In cas you wondered …
… Bryan Appleyard — Blog Archive — Why We Build. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Why We Build is a subtle, often eccentric but always entertaining guide to the building themes that have been consistent through the ages – sex, power, finance, eternity, hope etc.. Moore starts with the shabby, overblown, poorly-plumbed fakery of Dubai and ends in Sao Paulo amidst the staggering, sculpted brutalism of Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompeia. The book is neither a thesis nor a survey, rather it is a highly subjective view of how architecture works. You may frequently feel lost in these pages, but that, too, is an architectural experience.
RIP …
… Judith Crist, Film Critic, Dies at 90 - NYTimes.com.
Her enthusiasm for film cut across all genres. In a 1985 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, she insisted that a true movie fan takes James Bond as seriously as “the grand auteurism of Bergman.”
Thought for the day …
There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves.
— Barry Unsworth, born on this date in 1930
Thursday, August 09, 2012
Sounds about right …
… The Proms' neglect of Mozart means we are losing touch with his true genius | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… it is not the fact that there are only four pieces that concerns me – even though four is a smaller total than the number of works at this year's Proms by Bach, Beethoven, Boulez, Cage, Debussy, Delius, Elgar, Fauré, Handel, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams or Wagner. No complaints either about the works themselves – the whole of the Marriage of Figaro, the Clarinet Concerto, the Flute Concerto No 2 and the overture to Don Giovanni.Good God. Four pieces by Boulez and Cage.
What leaps out from this and other concert schedules of the modern era is the total absence of Mozart's symphonies.
Not such a bad guy …
… at least not all the time: Remembering Gore Vidal’s Early Work, Love of Movies, and Kind Words for a Young Novelist | Town Topics. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)
While he admits to being “a compulsive reader from the age of six,” he goes on to say that he was “so besotted with movies” that one Saturday he saw five “in a day.” Several pages farther on in Point to Point Navigation, the patrician intellectual of the obituaries confesses, “what I really wanted to be was a movie star: specifically, I wanted to be Mickey Rooney, and to play Puck, as he had done in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Hmm …
… The Tyranny of Artistic Modernism — Mark Anthony Signorelli. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Well, I certainly agree that modernism was not without its flaws and failures, and it's true that many of its contemporary devotees display the reactionary tendencies of aging revolutionaries. But I am not about to give up reading Wallace Stevens because he was a "high modernist." And I have no problem with the poetry of either John Ashbery or Geoffrey Hill. Signorelli doesn't seem to realize that he and his co-author often sound just as intolerant and tyrannical as the early modernists they so deplore. I suspect that Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata would not pass the Sophocles test, but the play remains a masterpiece.
Not so nice after all …
… Why Being Nice Means Nothing.
The word originated from the Latin nescius for “ignorant.” By the late 14th century, nice people were fussy or fastidious types: snobs who deliberated over a restaurant menu for twenty minutes. By the turn of the century, a nice person was someone with delicate sensibilities. In the 16th century, a nice person was someone who was very careful or precise. The proverb “more nice than wise” preserves some of these original meanings.
Congratulations …
… Website earns national honors | News | South Philly Review.
Maybe Philly.com should consult with them.
Maybe Philly.com should consult with them.
Thought for the day …
That which is everybody's business is nobody's business.
— Izaak Walton, born on this day in 1593
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Thoughtful …
… Summer Reading | Academic Librarian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… I have to wonder how naive someone has to be to believe that it could be otherwise, or that the U.S. Government and American corporations are especially wicked because they act in the way they do. What’s missing isn’t the proof of how they act, but the corrective attitude that acknowledges that the U.S. Government is no more wicked or duplicitous than than other governments, only more powerful. I’m inclined to believe Lord Acton that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Were all the communist regimes the U.S. illegally overthrew themselves the picture of perfect justice? The implicit tone and focus throughout the book is that if the U.S. Government interacts with any other countries or people it is almost always in the wrong, with the concomitant assumption that the other countries or people are therefore always in the right. Can this really be true? Is the world really made of perfect heroes and villains?
Comeback
… Thomas Browne, 17th-Century Author, Draws New Interest - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Hard not like a guy who could write that "Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela's of Hector." The first book I downloaded on my Kindle was Religio Medici.
Taken together the efforts represent the most sustained attention devoted to Browne since the 1960s. And though it’s probably too much to hope that he will become a household name, the revival might at least give him a shot at rejoining the list of literary monuments people complain about not having read, like Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.”
Hard not like a guy who could write that "Charles the fifth can never hope to live within two Methusela's of Hector." The first book I downloaded on my Kindle was Religio Medici.
The poetry of poise …
… Poetry: Corral's words are nothing if not poised | OregonLive.com. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Hear, hear …
… Kaddish II | The End Of The Pier Show. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
These Israeli athletes, who were Jewish (so please don’t recycle the conventional buttock-clenching bilge that criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitism, to let yourself off the hook, because it’s just not true) were Olympians, and deserve commemoration, loudly, and in the Olympic Stadium, before people of all nations, whether or not that makes people uncomfortable, and if it does, so much the better. The lives of Jews are plainly devalued to such an extent that their remembrance might occasion – wait for it - embarrassment.
It won't be long now …
… Banned in Cologne | Online Library of Law and Liberty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
In Germany a controversy has arisen over the practice of circumcision. A Muslim doctor in Cologne was brought before a court because a child aged 4 whom he had circumcised in his office bled heavily and had to be taken to hospital by his mother. The doctors at the hospital alerted the authorities because the rules regarding circumcision had been flouted, and the doctor ended up in court. He was subjected to no penalty, but the judges argued that no circumcision could be legally carried out, except for strictly medical reasons, until a boy had reached the age of religious discretion (deemed in Germany to be 14), when he could choose for himself.
Thought for the day …
I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.
— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, born on this date in 1896
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Under new management …
… John Banville to Revive Raymond Chandler’s Detective - GalleyCat. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Review …
… Karl Ove Knausgaard's “My Struggle” Review : The New Yorker.
I haven't read this yet (hence the bland header), because I plan on reviewing the book myself.
I haven't read this yet (hence the bland header), because I plan on reviewing the book myself.
Apologia pro vita sua …
… Will Self: modernism and me | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I had read The Marquise of O, and while it may have been the German Romantic's suicide pact that gripped me, the novella's exposure of the far more viciously constricting social mores of the early 19th century, and Kleist's opposition to them of a restless and uncertain self-consciousness, spoke to my own sense of being fundamentally ill at ease. I had gone to university to read politics and philosophy because I was interested in them and because an early exposure to then modish literary deconstruction (while doing an English S-level) had convinced me that critiquing fictional texts was not the right direction to go in if you wanted to create them. And create them is what I most fervently wanted to do. I can be guilty of overstatement in many areas – but this is not one of them: I felt a passionate desire to write fiction from about the age of 14, and I feel it still. That this passionate desire still seems to have been – even on the cusp of publishing my 14th work of narrative prose – unconsummated is, I suspect, a function of how the modernist pathology has slowly but inexorably metastasised through my murky mind.
Hmm …
… Karen Thompson Walker on Writing Great Sentences | Word Craft - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, dave Lull.)
… take this sentence from the middle of one my favorite novels, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy: "No moon rose beyond the murk and there was nowhere to go." Here, he poetically and vividly delivers an important piece of information—that the two characters have nowhere to go on this night. But he also suggests a much larger and more devastating truth: In the ravaged world he has created, there's nowhere on Earth for any of the survivors to go.Well, for my money, the sentence is overwritten and pretentious.
Who knew?
… Paulo Coelho: James Joyce's Ulysses is 'harmful' to literature | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day …
Do not say, 'It is morning,' and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.
— Rabindranath Tagore, who died on this date in 1941
Monday, August 06, 2012
P.G. Wodehouse
Typically, I'm not much for comic novels. But reading P.G. Wodehouse's The Inimitable Jeeves, I couldn't help but laugh.
In many ways, the novel reminded me of another funny book: Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889. Wodehouse - who published Jeeves in 1923 - shared something with Jerome: and it was more profound, I think, than a good laugh.
Both men were exceptional stylists. And both, too, were committed to what we might today call a formal narrative structure.
Put differently: at least part of what's funny about Jeeves or Three Men is that the laughter operates within a narrative defined by its ceremonial qualities, its customary nature. It's that layer of formality, I think, that enhances the humor, that magnifies the hilarity.
It's the incongruity, I suppose, that makes it all work. That is: the playfulness and unpredictability of the characters serve as a counter to the traditional qualities of the narration, which seek - above all else - to instill a sense of order. When this order is frustrated, we laugh.
And while there are moments in Jeeves and Three Men that are downright silly - including a large part in the former during which Bingo orchestrates a betting ring involving children's sports - there is also something redeeming about these moments: the silliness highlights the fact that serious writers can capture lighthearted moments and still be considered masters of their craft.
That's certainly the case for Wodehouse and Jerome, who shared a tremendous facility for language and story-telling.
RIP …
… Australian critic Robert Hughes dead - ABC Sydney - Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Back later …
I had one knee drained this morning and both injected with SynVisc. Basically, I just feel like lying down for a bit. Blogging will resume sometime soon.
Gwen alert …
… A Treasure Trove of Edward Gorey by Eve Bowen | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books. (Ht tip, Dave Lull.)
If memory serves, my stepdaughter Gwen can still recite a good chunk of The Gashleycrumb Tinies.
If memory serves, my stepdaughter Gwen can still recite a good chunk of The Gashleycrumb Tinies.
Encore …
… Henry Hitchings on The Language Wars… and Blogging —The Dabbler. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… as someone who reads blogs, I want to reflect – in tentative, Dabbler-ish style – on the question of whether there is a kind of writing peculiar to this newish medium.
Death and life …
… Book Review: Letters on God and Letters to a Young Woman - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For Rilke (1875-1926), God is difficult to grasp not because he is absent but because he has been pushed to the corners of our mind. "Could one not see the history of God," Rilke writes in one of the "Letters on God" now being published in English for the first time, "as if it were the side of the human condition that was never visited, always put off, saved up for later, and eventually missed out on altogether?" The poet's duty is to find him again.
A sucker for novelty …
… Bryan Appleyard — Blog Archive — Winterson’s World. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The novel has Wintersonian themes — lesbianism, powerful women, intense love and an ever-present, implicit sense of transcendence, of getting beyond this world — but it is a full-blooded horror story. It also has Shakespeare in a walk-in part. When, as a teenager, she was working through English literature from A to Z, she was asked why she’d read Shakespeare when she was only on M. Because, she replied, he is the entire A to Z.
Thought for the day …
All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens is raised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.
— Paul Claudel, born on this date in 1868
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Hear, hear …
… Washington Diarist: A Saint In The City | The New Republic.
Nothing has damaged Springsteen’s once-magnificent music more than his decision to become a spokesman for America. He is Howard Zinn with a guitar. The wounded workers in his songs do not have the authenticity of acquaintance; they are pious hackneyed tropes, stereotypical class martyrs from Guthrie and Steinbeck. Springsteen’s sympathy is genuine, but his people are not.
One of the best concerts I ever went to was a Bruce Springsteen concert. I think Nebraska is a masterpiece (a mannerist masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless). But Bruce long ago started taking himself too seriously. Or maybe not seriously enough. It's one thing to hear a guy in his 20s bitching about society. Hearing a 62-year-old multimillionaire bitching about society is something else altogether..
Sic transit …
… Richard Dawkins: an end to mythmaking? | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Dawkins's notion of a selfish gene is not so much a myth as a metaphor dubious from the outset that has only grown more such as time has passed and knowledge has grown. Myths are born or perhaps discovered. They are not simply made up.
Color me skeptical…
… Human cycles: History as science : Nature News and Comment. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Scientists should stick to science and not try to turn science into the answer for everything.
Scientists should stick to science and not try to turn science into the answer for everything.
Uncluttered and untricky …
… Head of the class.
First performed in London in 1902, "The Admirable Crichton" is the story of an upper-class London family whose eccentric but well-meaning patriarch, Lord Henry Lasenby, the Earl of Loam (Michael Page), subscribes to the Rousseauvian notion that "our divisions into classes are artificial" and that "if we were to return to nature, which is the aspiration of my life, all would be equal." Not so Crichton (Tom Frey), his omnicompetent, ultra-conservative butler, who believes no less devoutly that the English class system is "the natural outcome of a civilized society. There must always be a master and servants in all civilized communities...for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right."
You're invited …
… Six Songs of Me: Just why music matters so much to us ... | Music | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Perhaps one of the problems is a tendency to tackle these big questions in ways that are too general and abstract. One way to ground them is to look more closely and think more deeply about the music that matters most to each of us at a personal level, and the Guardian is launching a project called Six Songs of Me that helps to pose that question. Readers are invited to submit and share information about the music (and it may be songs or symphonies) in specific categories that has soundtracked their lives, and from this social experiment, some fascinating data should emerge that might help us to think more fruitfully about the "big questions" that lie behind the sounds of our lives.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Missing the point …
… Gore Vidal on Henry Miller - Waggish. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
The problem is that the fictional Miller and the real Miller are not the same. The latter takes the former with many grains of salt. (Also when one considers Vidal's own sexual boasting and literary pretensions, he was hardly in a position to cast any aspersions regarding such matters). Sexus is at times quite funny and for anyone who has lived in what I shall call a volatile relationship with a woman, it is very good at portraying the absurd agony of it all. As it says at the end, "Woof, woof."
Thought for the day …
In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
— Knut Hamsum, born on this date in 1859
Friday, August 03, 2012
Interrupted blogging …
We will be attending a friend's funeral today, so blogging will resume later.
Vintage commentary …
… Jacques Barzun's "William James As Artist" | The New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Not a fan …
… Brideshead Revisited (Modern Library #80).
It is safe to say that I did not shed a single tear for any of the assholes in Brideshead Revisited, although I was not without empathy. My salubrious contempt for people who bitch and moan when they have it all has been memorialized in several places, and I’m not likely to shake this quality anytime soon. It didn’t exactly enhance my reading experience when Charles Ryder, Waugh’s protagonist, was revealed to have the very exemplar of a free ride existence. Here is a Oxonian who lives beyond his means at school. Despite having a hearty coterie, a cushy spread, and a special friend named Sebastian Flyte (“we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs”), Charles feels “at heart that this was not all that Oxford had to offer.” He complains about his neighbors, treats his servant Lunt with some disgrace, and ingratiates himself with Sebastian’s family, the Marchmains, who are “rich in the way people who are who just let their money sit quiet.” First World problems all the way.
Perfectly valid points, and much the way many Brits seem to view this novel. But let me suggest another angle of approach, one that I came upon purely by accident during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. Brideshead was one of the books on the list of things to read before taking a course in the novel that fall. I had loved Decline and Fall and decided to start with Brideshead because I figured I could get the reading project off to a high-spirited start. I was maybe 50 or so pages into it, when I put the book down and said aloud to myself: "This is the saddest book I've ever read." I still think that, but I also think that you have to bring a Catholic sensibility to the book to feel that way. The characters' life of privilege seemed hollow to me from the start. Sebastian, I am sure, knows that. Charles Ryder comes to know that. Read from a sociological angle, Ed's criticism is spot on. But when I read Brideshead again a couple of years ago, it still struck me as it had when I was that college kid long ago.
Thought for the day …
What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.
— P.D. James, born on this date in 1920
Thursday, August 02, 2012
All is play …
… Vladimir Nabokov’s ringside vision of art and life | TLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
As a young man Nabokov had taken boxing lessons from a “wonderful rubbery Frenchman, Monsieur Loustatot”, fondly remembered in his autobiography, Speak, Memory; he boxed competitively as an undergraduate at Cambridge; and in Berlin he and his friend George Hessen staged a number of bouts. In 1924, he published a poem called “The Boxer’s Girlfriend”, and in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn (see below), the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a “comma”, a jab a “full stop”.
Indeed …
… The time is right to confront misconduct : Nature News and Comment. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
Thought for the day …
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.
— William S. Burroughs, who died on this date in 1997
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