If... (1968, Lindsey Anderson, director)

A strange 1968 film starring Malcolm McDowell as a junior at a deeply traditional English public school. A grower, for sure, starts out sleepily, moves through a three-act, dramatic construction that grows more surreal and violent.

McDowell is exceptionally cast.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes by Paul Murray, The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

"No, no..." I hastened to set her at ease. "I've heard far worse stories. For instance, this one chap I know, Pongo McGurks, his family had a butler, name of Sanderson - had him for years, used to swear by him, best butler they'd ever hard, et cetera. Then they come back early from a weekend away to find him in Pongo's mother's wedding dress, about to have the toaster marry him to the cuckoo clock."

"Oh." She seemed not quite to know what to make of this. "And this happens often?"

"No, I suppose it's pretty rare," I conceded. "I mean, it's rare that you have a butler who's a perfect size ten." This wasn't coming out right at all.

What a long slog of a heavily-favored book by a young Irish writer whose new novel, Skippy Dies, was what I was actually looking for. But it's too new, the library didn't have it, so I got this one, and hope I didn't poison my own well-spring of enthusiasm for this guy, because THE EVENING just didn't cut it, took forever, not in the good way of the Stieg Larsson series, for instance, or the recent The Lonely Polygamist, which I still haven't gotten around to talking about. Just forever like, this is boring, it does sound just enough like P.G. Wodehouse at times then I guess I'm going to hang around and finish it but when will it GET GOOD?


Putting these two books together out of sheer impishness, a shared phrase in the titles. Two more different books could probably not exist.

Money. Those are the first five letters of his alphabet.

Unposed, Photographs by Craig Semetko

PRE-ORDER IT MOFO

Song of a Camera
a poem by Thom Gunn

for Robert Mapplethorpe

I cut the sentence
out of a life
out of the story
with my little knife

Each bit I cut
shows one alone
dressed or undressed
young full-grown

Look at the bits
He eats he cries
Look at the way
he stands he dies

so that another
seeing the bits
and seeing how
none of them fits

wants to add
adverbs to verbs
A bit on his own
simply disturbs

Wants to say
as well as see
wants to say
valiantly

interpreting
some look in the eyes
a triumph mixed up
with surprise

I cut this sentence
look again
for cowardice
boredom pain

Find what you seek
find what you fear
and be assured
nothing is here

I am the eye
that cut the life
you stand you lie
I am the knife

Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Molloy

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can't help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it's hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it's not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It's nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It's unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.

There I am then back in the saddle, in my numbed heart a prick of misgiving, like one dying of cancer obliged to consult his dentist.

All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.

Precautions are like resolutions, to be taken with precaution.

For I always say either too much or too little, which is a terrible thing for a man with a passion for truth like mine.

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

"I got a young woman into trouble at the age of eighteen," Walter said. "Daughter of one of our footmen. He was an Irish fellow. The butler caught him reading Nietzsche in the pantry. To the detriment of the silver. Of course there was no question of my marrying his daughter. The family made a settlement, and I went abroad to paint. My hair turned white at the age of nineteen."

He resolved to go to confession, less to rid himself of the past night's thoughts - since his priest made a distinction between sins of thought and these convulsive dances and dialogues of the mind - than to receive, in absolution, a friendly gesture of recognition from the maker of heaven and earth, vigilant manipulator of the falling sickness.

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others beside ourselves, he thought, who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history.

The Quickening Maze by Alan Foulds

This unusual novel imagines the confluence of two great 19th century poets, John Clare and Alfred Tennyson, after Tennyson's brother Septimus is confined to the same mental asylum that Clare has been committed to. They barely meet, but their associates and friends intermingle, and the associations lend a mystical atmosphere to what is already a heady environment for poetry. Clare, an extreme alcoholic, escapes several times from the ground to take up with a colony of gypsies staying in the surrounding forest, exiled as they had been from English common land by draconian property laws, the infamous "enclosure" enforcement that reduced the circumstances of the poor working class even more.

The asylum director falls into a friendship with Tennyson and borrows money from him to fund an invention, a device for mass producing craft wood furniture, which fails utterly. The director's daughter falls in love with Tennyson.

The Fear Of Flowers

The nodding oxeye bends before the wind,
The woodbine quakes lest boys their flowers should find,
And prickly dogrose spite of its array
Can't dare the blossom-seeking hand away,
While thistles wear their heavy knobs of bloom
Proud as a warhorse wears its haughty plume,
And by the roadside danger's self defy;
On commons where pined sheep and oxen lie
In ruddy pomp and ever thronging mood
It stands and spreads like danger in a wood,
And in the village street where meanest weeds
Can't stand untouched to fill their husks with seeds,
The haughty thistle oer all danger towers,
In every place the very wasp of flowers.

John Clare

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

www.sarahblakebooks.com

Model Home by Eric Puchner

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me by Richard Farina

Let me tell you, man, you can't move in this country without catching your heel in a hangup. Mousetails in your root beer, grubs in your Hershey bar, always some kind of worm in the image, muching away.

A dazzling, fizzling, appalling, and tragic book. Farina, a classmate and sometimes-pal of Thomas Pynchon's (Gravity's Rainbow is dedicated to Farina) at Cornell, also enjoyed a career as a folk-rocker, married to Joan Baez's sister Mimi, and recorded several seminal folk-rock albums with her, including the stunning Celebrations for a Grey Day. (In David Hajdu's provocative cultural memoir Positively 4th Street, Farina even gets credited with creating the knowing, enigmatic, American artiste-as-provocateur persona that no less than Bob Dylan steals and makes his own.)

In 1966, he slipped out of a publication party for Been Down So Long to ride with a friend on his new motorcycle, and died off a hairpin turn in the Carmel hills.

Haven't read it in years, but remember parts so clearly. The prose is heavily written and re-written, there is a cannabis smell to it, too worked over, an emphasis on sensation and re-representation, rather than versimilitude. Too many words. Too many descriptions. Many bad trips and sensations of bad things coming. But there is marvelous stuff, too: Gnossos dancing on the ice packs covering the local river at the beginning of the spring thaw, urging Spring on, some incredible character thumbnails, his red-gummed Indian neighbors forever drunk on grenadine and gin, slipping prophecies under his door, the lists, the lists! Wish I had the nerve (or the typing skill) to recreate them here.

It received bad reviews when it appeared, but critical opinion over the years has changed as the novel's place in the canon of 60s literature has grown more assured.

The plot is ridiculous and campus-bound, but enhanced by intercut scenes of what Gnossos was doing before returning to campus, when he roamed the West and witnessed a nucelar test detonation in the desert, stoned on mescaline, marijuana (his beloved "panegyric") and drunk on boozed (his beloved "lush.").

The problem is motivation: why is Gnossos so quest- and darkness-obsessed? I hate to sound like a wrtng instrctr, but... back story?

The lists are dense and telling: American plastic culture at its best and most dizzying. I tell you, I think it's a better book than Pynchon's initial sally The Crying of Lot 49.

It's pre-hippie, pre Summer of Love. The only music is some jazz (Brubeck is dissed, Miles is adored), some Mose Allison, some soul references, some Indian raga music.

The president is Eisenhower. The year is 1958. The setting is a college campus in upstate New York positively pulled with Greek-sounded streets and buildings. The narrator, Gnossos Papadopoulis, is clearly Greek. The scene on campus is seething: the administration is cracking down on sex, and the students are rising up against curfew hours and restrictions.

There is (without doubt) an immaturity to the book, a misogyny: Gnossoes is self-conscious to the point of paralysis, Hamletian. But Farina was all of 29 when he finished it. If anything, what doomed it at the time is that it was a 1969 book published in 1966, way ahead of its time.

Farina had an Irish father and a Cuban mother, allegedly fought in Cuba with Castro.

Death, "For the Whole World to See"

Sheesh. Great lost Detroit black punk band, who recorded seven singles in and around 1974 with the help of Funkadelic producer Don Davis, who must not have done much but turn the recorder on and let it bleed. Certainly some MC5 ringing in their ears, little Stooges, not much metal in the fast stuff but some in the bluesy slower stuff: the tremendous thing about these songs is not who they sound LIKE, but who FOLLOWED them and sounded like them. Particularly the Bad Brains, who either listened to this in their sleep or are these guys children. The stuttering drums, the crushing guitar riffs, the simple-as-brain-damage refrains, the dum-dum-bullet-stupid bass: I'm such a troglodyte at heart! "Keep on Knocking" is the standout, but "Rock n Roll Victim" is the Bad Brains-ish one for sure. Love the songs, love the narrative (brought to me, pathetically enough, by a New Yorker article about them this week. But it made me crank some Bad Brains for the wife, and we thought we were hearing some lost Kiss or some neanderthal Van Halen for sure. For thor's sake buy it (not that I did) and give the guys some money after all these years.

The Suspect, L. R. Wright

A quietly satisfying mystery novel, remniscent of Simenon: one finds out WhoDunIt in the first pages, but the book unfolds as as WhyDunIt, a masterful character study set in a small town in British Columbia featuring a Royal Mountie detective, a librarian, and two old men, principally, but other characters are quickly and deftly sketched.

There is very little violence, except implied, or recalled: the murder of one very old man by another very old man. The reason for the crime comes out slowly, through flashbacks. The tremendous natural landscape of BC plays a role too, as a destructive force each character struggles against, as a creative force each character struggles to find a nourishing spot within.

Sleep while I Sing takes place after The Suspect: the detective and the librarian are repeating characters, and their relationship, romantic, emotional and intellectual, is important in both books.

Palladio by Jonathan Dee

I read Palladio with excitement and curiosity, a novel about the advertising business (and other things). My good friend and fiction reviewer without peer Donna Rifkind had recommended Dee's new novel, The Privileges, but I had to wait for my hold at the public library, and snapped up Palladio in the meantime. Dee is a morbidly interesting writer -- that is, I had no idea I was so interested in the world of advertising, the contemporary world of advertising, as well as a thumbnail history of advertising in America in the past fifty years, until Dee began telling me a story about a young man and an older man in that business. Oh yeah, there's a woman too, but it's mostly about advertising. Dee will be compared (by others certainly, and now by me) to Tom Wolfe, since there is a "masters of the universe" sort of a feel to his protagonists (even more so The Privileges) and if I had ever been able to finish a single Wolf novel, I might even make the comparison ring true. But I haven't. Still recommend this book, though: Dee has a marvelous gift.

So I get the new one finally and I'm in a tizzy of anticipation, glancing at it on my nightstand, dutifully (and happily, if in a hard-working sort of way) finishing David Mitchell's stunning Cloud Atlas before I dig in. And The Privileges is a good read, compelling, and Dee once again makes several uber-rich lives somewhat transparent to me and interesting, but on the whole the new one was a disappointment, second half of the book never really delivers on the thesis grandly contstructed in the first half -- that is, a successful couple, I mean so successful that in the second half of the novels pedestrian details like actual numbers of dollars and how many millions have vanished completely , a successful couple (and their couple of somewhat less successful, if gorgeous, children) will have to eventually pay the piper in some fashion for all their success. They don't pay. The wife's father dies, the husband blows out his knee during one of his fanatical workouts, they must stand by their daughter after she is in a bad car wreck where some people apparently die, after partying for several days and nights with her at one of her family's many luxury homes, and the son is held hostage by an "outsider artist" he is considering promoting. (I'm not making that outsider artist bit up, though it sounds like I am.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a tour de force. A lengthy "novel" consisting of six novellas that move chronologically from the early 19th century to the distant post-apocalyptic future in the first half of the book, then reverse and run backwards in time in the second half (from p.a. future to 19th century, so we end where we began), and which six novellas are linked with what at first seem to be casual coincidences (the diary chronicling a sea voyage in the first novella becomes a tattered rare book that a young composer in the 1930s finds and reads in the second novella, a piece by the young composer is heard in the third novella), it as ambitious and experimental and daring as it is compellingly and closely written in each of the six wildly-different narratives.

The Hidden Fortress, Akira Kurosawa

My son and I saw THE HIDDEN FORTRESS at AFI Silver yesterday afternoon, what a masterpiece! The 21-year old Misa Uehara as the Princess was particuarly astounding, more than holding her own next to the redoubtable Toshiro Mifune as the General, and Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as the two peasants reluctantly accompanying the Princess across ... See Moreenemy territory. They are equal parts Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, the grave-diggers from Hamlet, and reputedly George Lucas's models for C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars. A stunner.

Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy (1971)

Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic-sexual-religious longing I woke up with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same... The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.

Blame by Michelle Huneven

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

So... no review yet, Seana? OK i get it -- this brilliant book speaks for itself, it's the story i most wish i'd written by the writer i most wish i were. first experience of it was a vinyl LP (yes i'm old) recorded book from the library -- first 2 chapters, read by kvjr. himself. (the other 2formative lps were spoken chapters of walden and george carlin's am/fm.) read the book soon thereafter and over & over since, and thanks to it i am perpetually (like billy pilgrim) unstuck in time, and convinced (like the tralfamordians) that life's just a bowl of cherries, i.e. a collection of vividly tasted moments, occurring simultaneously & ever accessible in the 'here and now.') point is... thank you, kvjr, and thanks sean for bringing him to mind.

I quote (without permission, thus far) a comment by my old and deep friend Steve Hayes, a mentor, nay, magister!, whom I am lucky enough to have held on to all these years, a comment spurning me to complete this hapless posting of a cover image of my beloved Schlacthaus Funf, which Steve and I probably read for the first time within a year or two of each of at Gonzaga High School. Yes, a terribly special book, a memorable book which I too have re-read over the years without any real need, since whole paragraphs seem to spring to memory whenever I wish, untrue about almost every other novel I have read in my life, a life which will be most notable for Number Of Novels Consumed, if nothing else.

First and foremost, the prose style is beautifully simple and profound, one reason it was such a controversial smash when it was published (1969), as it finds avid fallow soil in the adolescent mind. The simple declarative (but no less allusive) sentences are still rigidly effective after so many years. After a fervent teen following in the 1970s, it has been widely banned and contested as suitable reading material for high school students, ever since, the way they bury a book in Amurica.

The number of Germans burned to a crisp in the fire-bombing of Dresden may very well be closer to 25,000 than to the 132,000 that Vonnegut claims, and this may be of import to the burnt-bean-counters of miliary logistics, but Vonnegut's moral and aesthetic claim that this ruined the subsequent imaginary life of his poor hero Billy Pilgrim is without challenge, vide PTSD ruining the lives of hundreds of war veterans in the past 20 years who witnessed far less numerical slaughter in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second and foremore, it is an anti-war novel about a war -- WWII -- still roundly acclaimed as "the last good war." And a good 'un it undoubtedly is in the prism of history, the systematic defeat of a global menace. But Vonnegut sticks to his man's eyes -- Billy Pilgrim's -- a fragile set of eyes to begin with, that crumple in the very first instance of hands-on warfare. And Vonnegut is more concerned with the larger lens of the years that follow Billy Pilgrim's brief, utterly naive service in the very last months of the Second World War, as Billy returns to America and collapses slowly and inutterably over the 25 years that follow.

For me, at least now when the assurance of science fiction printed literature has abided a great deal (who cares now that you can buy the game and BE THE SHIT, right?), the science fiction sections of the novel are not as moving as they once were, but they certainly provide a counterpoint, and it's important to remember the vital emergence of science fiction in American literature in the 1950s and 1960s (Slaughterhouse Five lost out to no less than Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (another shatteringly good "sci fi" title) in 1970 for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, no small shit for us pointy-headed sci fi fans at the time).

It seems to do that rare thing in penetrating a harsh shared space between realistic fiction and "speculative fiction," where the jump to speculative is a result of something real, is a psychological adjustment, and makes more sense than just the pure fantasy realm.

There, Steve: it's what I got, at the moment. But I hear you, and adore it much the same as you did, and do.

Also snuck in the surprisingly good 1973 film of same right after I read this -- Ame liked it too -- it had this gooey early 1970s film technique to it that was jes right.

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Drunken Angel, 1948 film by Akira Kurosawa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdyVxVvTVXo

Lit by Mary Karr and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around. - GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

I'm going to try to combine an appreciation of books side by side. It had occurred to me already, late in Karr's memoir, that I might find some friction and frisson by writing about both while balanced on one beam, before the late-breaking development that she falls for Merton and converts to Catholicism herself.

This book didn't dazzle me like Liar's Club did (now due for a revisit, seventeen years after I first read it), and I totally missed Cherry. But it grew on me. Almost tossed it aside halfway through -- I don't love non-fiction, particularly memoirs -- there's this pathetic, completely naive reader in me (the larger part, for sure) who listens to voices in narrative and believes they are real, despite the genre -- and I had niggling concerns throughout this book that I actually might hate the speaker and that because she was in fact a real person, this bothered me to no end.






How embarassing that I'd never read this earlier. A gorgeous, profound meditation on living and meaning.

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance bu by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intelletct that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. (p. 29-30, Harcourt Brice, 1998, 50th Anniversary Edition.)

The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most; and his suffering comes to him from things so little and trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. (p. 91)