Showing posts with label merry old england. Show all posts
Showing posts with label merry old england. Show all posts
04.10.19
we were chatting about werner herzog's nosferatu the vampyre at ye olde charity bookstore today. "did you know V found him in her bed once?" B asked me. nosferatu?! "no, werner herzog." i made a beeline for V. "well, yes, but he wasn't there for me," she said. "i had an assistant back then, and i came home one day and just found them both in there. i shouted for them to get out, and she whispered to me, 'but V, it's werner herzog.' 'i don't give a shit who it is,' i said." she knows that i'm heading overseas tomorrow, and she asked me to report back on mayhem in the UK this weekend. i, in turn, made her promise to rule the store with an iron fist in my absence. "yes, the corrupt republic of V!" she exclaimed.
03.11.14
101 in 1001 {III}: 022 see at least 6 more of shakespeare's plays for the first time [completed 02.21.14]
at some point in the '80s a community theatre company came to my elementary school and performed the pyramus-and-thisbe scene from a midsummer night's dream; i tingled both with the dead leg i always got from wearing a skirt on assembly day and having to sit sidesaddle on the carpeted multi-purpose-room floor and with the first stirrings of a serious and lifelong shakespeare jones. for the next decade i tended to scratch the itch with rental movies and questionable summer stock productions, but things got and stayed serious when i went away to college and discovered that no one would prevent me from registering for every shakespeare and shakespeare-adjacent class i could find. joe and i turned into a couple when our overseas program sent us to stratford for shakespeare's birthday and a few dozen royal shakespeare company productions; our friend jacob read sonnet 116 at our wedding. i'll fold in another playwright every now and again if i must—we roll out for shakespeare in the park twice every summer whether the second show is more shakespeare or, like, into the woods (eh) or hair (FAH), and we're turning into regulars at playwrights horizons—but i have weathered a lot of midsummers at this point, is what i'm saying. i wondered if six "new" plays could really be new to me.
happily, they can; having to chase down happenings like a matinee performance of the national theatre's fantastic post-financial-crash timon of athens when we were in london for a wedding and a crazily-edited international-collaboration version of antony and cleopatra set in colonial haiti* has been good for me. i now know, for example, that "timon" rhymes with "simon" and not "limón," and that london retirees love eating ice cream super-loudly more than i have ever loved anything. i have new favorite language on stoicism (from antony and cleopatra, act IV, scene 14)...
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen performed live?
02 the worst theatrical production you've ever seen?** the best?
03 would you be more likely to eat at a matinee performance than at an evening performance? (yes, i'm asking about eating in theaters again.)
*that one was just down the street at the public's snazzy new HQ on lafayette, but you get my drift.
**one of my shakespeare profs, the inimitable charles lyons, told a wonderful story about a production in which the beleaguered actor playing hamlet was unable to stab through gertrude's bedroom draperies in order to kill polonius and was finally encouraged by the audience to beat him to death.
at some point in the '80s a community theatre company came to my elementary school and performed the pyramus-and-thisbe scene from a midsummer night's dream; i tingled both with the dead leg i always got from wearing a skirt on assembly day and having to sit sidesaddle on the carpeted multi-purpose-room floor and with the first stirrings of a serious and lifelong shakespeare jones. for the next decade i tended to scratch the itch with rental movies and questionable summer stock productions, but things got and stayed serious when i went away to college and discovered that no one would prevent me from registering for every shakespeare and shakespeare-adjacent class i could find. joe and i turned into a couple when our overseas program sent us to stratford for shakespeare's birthday and a few dozen royal shakespeare company productions; our friend jacob read sonnet 116 at our wedding. i'll fold in another playwright every now and again if i must—we roll out for shakespeare in the park twice every summer whether the second show is more shakespeare or, like, into the woods (eh) or hair (FAH), and we're turning into regulars at playwrights horizons—but i have weathered a lot of midsummers at this point, is what i'm saying. i wondered if six "new" plays could really be new to me.
happily, they can; having to chase down happenings like a matinee performance of the national theatre's fantastic post-financial-crash timon of athens when we were in london for a wedding and a crazily-edited international-collaboration version of antony and cleopatra set in colonial haiti* has been good for me. i now know, for example, that "timon" rhymes with "simon" and not "limón," and that london retirees love eating ice cream super-loudly more than i have ever loved anything. i have new favorite language on stoicism (from antony and cleopatra, act IV, scene 14)...
Nay, good my fellows, do not please sharp fate...and i know never to cast a semi-mechanical water snake in a death scene (so distracting!). i have enjoyed myself immensely.
To grace it with your sorrows: bid that welcome
Which comes to punish us, and we punish it
Seeming to bear it lightly. Take me up:
I have led you oft: carry me now, good friends,
And have my thanks for all.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 how many of shakespeare's plays have you seen performed live?
02 the worst theatrical production you've ever seen?** the best?
03 would you be more likely to eat at a matinee performance than at an evening performance? (yes, i'm asking about eating in theaters again.)
*that one was just down the street at the public's snazzy new HQ on lafayette, but you get my drift.
**one of my shakespeare profs, the inimitable charles lyons, told a wonderful story about a production in which the beleaguered actor playing hamlet was unable to stab through gertrude's bedroom draperies in order to kill polonius and was finally encouraged by the audience to beat him to death.
12.10.13
the dirty dozen {twelve things before the tropics, where, i'm told, it is rainy}: part 2 of 2
07 thistle hill tavern's buffalo cauliflower recipe.
08 simon beck walks all day to make massive patterns in the snow.
09 DENVER IN MANTLE OF SHIMMERING WHITE STOPS ACTIVITY AND EVERYBODY JOLLIFIES.
10 joe called me at work yesterday afternoon to report that he'd looked at the little silhouettes on the cans more closely and it turns out we've been feeding steve and matty dog food for the last month. i asked the internet if this was irreparable. cats are not small dogs, the internet said.
11 on royal swan upping.
12 frank o'hara, from "meditations in an emergency:"
07 thistle hill tavern's buffalo cauliflower recipe.
08 simon beck walks all day to make massive patterns in the snow.
09 DENVER IN MANTLE OF SHIMMERING WHITE STOPS ACTIVITY AND EVERYBODY JOLLIFIES.
10 joe called me at work yesterday afternoon to report that he'd looked at the little silhouettes on the cans more closely and it turns out we've been feeding steve and matty dog food for the last month. i asked the internet if this was irreparable. cats are not small dogs, the internet said.
11 on royal swan upping.
12 frank o'hara, from "meditations in an emergency:"
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh.
10.26.12
101 in 1001 {III}: 018 visit the ashmolean [completed 09.18.12]
{satan, jean-jacques feuchère, c. 1836}
{unicorn violence}
{head of sobek the crocodile god}
{mummy wrapping detail}
emily nussbaum observed in the new yorker a few weeks ago that television networks, like people, have personalities. museums are people, i think; oxford's ashmolean could be my college roommate's casually fantastic mother, cece, who remarked at said roommate's rehearsal dinner last friday that she had spent part of the previous evening playing the hawaiian wedding song on a ukelele she'd built herself and inlaid with flames. elias ashmole, a seventeenth-century maximalist after my own heart, gave the university a magnificent shitload of curiosities and antiquities along with his financial support, and the institution that grew up around that collection is as byzantine as the collection itself. profusion of that kind is a mixed blessing: i spent half an hour pinballing angrily between recast statuary (c'mon, ashmole: your bag of tricks is that deep and you're giving me bootlegs?) and more pottery than i'll ever need to appreciate (sorry, pottery), convincing myself that my guidebook's insistence that guy fawkes's lantern was in room 27 or 29 was some sort of ultra-dry british humor. i then wandered into the egypt hall and spent another half hour lidless as a fish with the best mummy collection i've ever seen. that was the ashmolean's cece moment: respectable gallery, respectable gallery, p.s. let me just ninja in here with my mind-blowing awesome.
it remains a bit pathetic that in six months of living within a stroll of the ashmolean's statuary-and-pottery-and-lantern-and-mummies i managed not a single visit. in my defense, i spent half of those months with joe, and he's diverting (sometimes annoyingly so: when we were out in california for that wedding last weekend, my mother gave him her stanford class ring. my mother!). sloth had a way of working out for me, as it sometimes does; the museum underwent a massive rebuild in 2009, and the egypt hall reopened to great fanfare with its all-new (old) mummy army just last year. the 101 in 1001 list's lesson this time around, perhaps, is that armies of mummies arrive when one is best disposed to confront them. thank goodness, really, for that.
{satan, jean-jacques feuchère, c. 1836}
{unicorn violence}
{head of sobek the crocodile god}
{mummy wrapping detail}
emily nussbaum observed in the new yorker a few weeks ago that television networks, like people, have personalities. museums are people, i think; oxford's ashmolean could be my college roommate's casually fantastic mother, cece, who remarked at said roommate's rehearsal dinner last friday that she had spent part of the previous evening playing the hawaiian wedding song on a ukelele she'd built herself and inlaid with flames. elias ashmole, a seventeenth-century maximalist after my own heart, gave the university a magnificent shitload of curiosities and antiquities along with his financial support, and the institution that grew up around that collection is as byzantine as the collection itself. profusion of that kind is a mixed blessing: i spent half an hour pinballing angrily between recast statuary (c'mon, ashmole: your bag of tricks is that deep and you're giving me bootlegs?) and more pottery than i'll ever need to appreciate (sorry, pottery), convincing myself that my guidebook's insistence that guy fawkes's lantern was in room 27 or 29 was some sort of ultra-dry british humor. i then wandered into the egypt hall and spent another half hour lidless as a fish with the best mummy collection i've ever seen. that was the ashmolean's cece moment: respectable gallery, respectable gallery, p.s. let me just ninja in here with my mind-blowing awesome.
it remains a bit pathetic that in six months of living within a stroll of the ashmolean's statuary-and-pottery-and-lantern-and-mummies i managed not a single visit. in my defense, i spent half of those months with joe, and he's diverting (sometimes annoyingly so: when we were out in california for that wedding last weekend, my mother gave him her stanford class ring. my mother!). sloth had a way of working out for me, as it sometimes does; the museum underwent a massive rebuild in 2009, and the egypt hall reopened to great fanfare with its all-new (old) mummy army just last year. the 101 in 1001 list's lesson this time around, perhaps, is that armies of mummies arrive when one is best disposed to confront them. thank goodness, really, for that.
09.26.12
09.14.12: tino sehgal's "these associations," turbine hall, tate modern. eddies of loose-limbed men and women in performance artists' conspicuously plain clothing catch at each other across the hall's concrete. some have snagged on the walls in groups of two or three; others spin away in my wake as i pass. i take the center of the room slowly, let its gravity pull me down. i'll take a few deep breaths and leave. i'll sit to demonstrate that i'm not afraid and i'll leave. "it was when i was four years old, and my mother and i were sitting on her bed," the woman suddenly at my shoulder says. she's scooted across the floor to get next to me and has folded her wrists across her knees. her father was frequently absent from their home, and it made her mother cry; she herself was too young to know how to respond, to address her mother as another person in need. this was in greece. i tell her that my father once asked me if i thought he deserved to be happy - this was in the months after he left my mother, when i was out of college and living in san francisco - and i realized that i was not going to be a child. the lights in the hall go out, one by one, and as i rejoin joe on the stairs i haven't yet decided if i'll tell him what we talked about.
09.04.12
a little over a week from now, we'll be back in britain for the first time in a long time. i've been dancing like an overstimulated terrier in anticipation of it; oxford in particular is so dear to me that i think of the intervening years, not the six months and change i lived there or the weeks i've returned, as time spent abroad. the whole trip, planned lauren-style in longhand on the backs of dogeared flyers and magazine programs and collected in a mead folder with a robot on the front, will be wonderful: we're flying out to london, where we'll cheer for my old friend eric as he marries an excellent englishwoman (nicola's in publishing and the reception is at stationers' hall, so they're printing up menus which will look like real newspapers with characteristic headlines - IMMIGRANTS STEALING OUR MOST ELIGIBLE WOMEN! [the daily mail], TRANSATLANTIC MERGER CLOSES [the financial times], and so on), then we're going up to oxford, where we'll stash our stuff in one of the eight-hundred-year-old student rooms at magdalen (which are just across the high street from where we were married) and gallop around town for a week. we'll be back down in london for an afternoon, probably, but we'll spend most of our time visiting beloved sandwiches, reacquainting ourselves with ahmed and pitted tables of note, and disappearing around corners.
08.20.12
when our little cat died in front of us a few summers ago, joe and i spent the afternoon dazed and drifting around the city, beaching ourselves at meaningless corners and patches of grass like sea creatures with inner-ear damage. you're married, i thought, when you hold something down together and you kill it. months after that, when our friend judd called to tell us we would be allowed at last to buy our apartment and i cried with relief at my desk, you're married, i thought, when you turn yourselves inside out for your home.
our dear friends lesley and cody were married at a storied old chorizo factory in the village last month. the building's core had been reimagined as an atrium, and light from the glass roof filtered all the way down to where they stood together on the first floor. we gathered with the other guests at the rails of the great staircase-whorls above them, the steps and landings following the walls like the chambers of a nautilus. loving cody, lesley explained to him, was something she couldn't not do; it was breathing. you're married, i thought.
i don't know that my relationship - or any relationship - is especially instructive; each pair is its own species, i think, and things we find toxic are quite nourishing for others (and vice versa, i'm sure). i do know that the thirteen shitty, wondrous, improbable years since joe and i met in a garden in oxford have been the best of my life, and that as i married him - six years ago today - i became myself. that's all.
our dear friends lesley and cody were married at a storied old chorizo factory in the village last month. the building's core had been reimagined as an atrium, and light from the glass roof filtered all the way down to where they stood together on the first floor. we gathered with the other guests at the rails of the great staircase-whorls above them, the steps and landings following the walls like the chambers of a nautilus. loving cody, lesley explained to him, was something she couldn't not do; it was breathing. you're married, i thought.
i don't know that my relationship - or any relationship - is especially instructive; each pair is its own species, i think, and things we find toxic are quite nourishing for others (and vice versa, i'm sure). i do know that the thirteen shitty, wondrous, improbable years since joe and i met in a garden in oxford have been the best of my life, and that as i married him - six years ago today - i became myself. that's all.
01.19.11
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 33
SURVIVOR: rabbit at rest (john updike)*
CHALLENGER: our tragic universe (scarlett thomas)
i'm not entirely sure what our tragic universe wants. as one reviewer put it, "i wanted to root for this novel and its brain-bending, occasionally contradictory signifiers; i also found myself yearning for a way in." after kicking things off with a thought-experiment quote from baudrillard's simulacra and simulation, scarlett thomas presents us with meg, an asthmatic hack writer in devonshire who pens adventure novels as zeb ross, modern-day england's composite-author equivalent of carolyn keene or gossip girl's cecily von ziegesar.** meg's a hack writer in the grub street sense of the term: she'd vastly prefer to be plugging away at the serious novel she promised her publisher ages ago, but she has to support her shiftless boyfriend in the interim, and she writes a page only to delete four more. were i to attempt serious fiction at all (a mistake i haven't made since college), i'd find it near-impossible to write surrounded by friends like meg's: her set is riddled with author-philosophers who congregate around booze to argue about which stories get to be stories in the first place.
i do quite like some of thomas's other meanderings; she's a great admirer of chekhov's and tolstoy's, and her characters' chats about their relationship**** got me all excited about reading their letters (and anna karenina, which i finished on a train over the weekend and will toss into the first arena of the new year when i finish slogging through these december books). there's also a lovely bit about robert louis stevenson's travels with a donkey in the cévennes about the beast of gévaudan, the chupacabra of the baskervilles of 18th-century france:
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 33
SURVIVOR: rabbit at rest (john updike)*
CHALLENGER: our tragic universe (scarlett thomas)
i'm not entirely sure what our tragic universe wants. as one reviewer put it, "i wanted to root for this novel and its brain-bending, occasionally contradictory signifiers; i also found myself yearning for a way in." after kicking things off with a thought-experiment quote from baudrillard's simulacra and simulation, scarlett thomas presents us with meg, an asthmatic hack writer in devonshire who pens adventure novels as zeb ross, modern-day england's composite-author equivalent of carolyn keene or gossip girl's cecily von ziegesar.** meg's a hack writer in the grub street sense of the term: she'd vastly prefer to be plugging away at the serious novel she promised her publisher ages ago, but she has to support her shiftless boyfriend in the interim, and she writes a page only to delete four more. were i to attempt serious fiction at all (a mistake i haven't made since college), i'd find it near-impossible to write surrounded by friends like meg's: her set is riddled with author-philosophers who congregate around booze to argue about which stories get to be stories in the first place.
'Isn't this the problem of definition?' Claudia said. 'They obviously weren't telling "stories" as we would understand them. If we say that a story is something with a beginning, a middle and an end, deterministically linked, with at least one main character, then someone else can't come along and say that a story is actually defined as "anything anyone ever says".'i'm willing to believe people speak this way, but i have a hard time imagining that they do so all the time. meg's lumpen boyfriend excepted, thomas's characters sure do. "i wanted to write a novel while at the same time unravelling it, so that the result would be simultaneously broken and whole," thomas has said. it...is; i'm not always entirely sure what's going on, particularly when characters are arguing about an american author's discussion of the omega point, an infinitely powerful instant at the end of the finite universe at which it will be possible for us to create an infinity of perfect post-universes in which we live forever. i bitched to joe this weekend about how long it's taken me to pull together this THUNDERTOME: "it's this intentionally storyless story about the death of the author and all this philosophy." "whose philosophy?!"*** "i'm not entirely sure, but i don't like it."
How about if we define "story" differently again?' Frank said. 'What if a story is simply any representation of agents acting? What if that's all it is, and the shape of the narrative, its determinism, its construction of "good" and "bad" characters and so on are culturally specific?'
i do quite like some of thomas's other meanderings; she's a great admirer of chekhov's and tolstoy's, and her characters' chats about their relationship**** got me all excited about reading their letters (and anna karenina, which i finished on a train over the weekend and will toss into the first arena of the new year when i finish slogging through these december books). there's also a lovely bit about robert louis stevenson's travels with a donkey in the cévennes about the beast of gévaudan, the chupacabra of the baskervilles of 18th-century france:
'"Wolves, alas! like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance, and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king's high road..." There's a bit more after that, Tim said. 'Sometime later Stevenson is lost, and meets two young girls who won't give him directions. One pokes her tongue out at him, and the other just tells him to follow the cows. He says then, "The Beast of Gévaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I began to think of him with sympathy."'i came away from our tragic universe with a rather fine reading list, and i appreciate that. i also appreciate thomas's clever imagery, and her affection for her meandering, flawed characters; it would be easy to satirize them, but she does what she can to present them realistically. until they begin chasing beasts and disappearing and maybe practicing magic, that is.
'You shouldn't be able to fix the meaning of the universe, just as you shouldn't be able to reduce Hamlet or Anna Karenina to a sentence or say what they "really mean". I want a tragic universe, not a nice rounded-off universe with a moral at the end. And I don't think looking for a final meaning for the universe is rewarding either.'fair enough, ms. thomas. i do hope we stumble upon each other in a conversation somewhere else, as you seem lovely; this just isn't quite my scene.
VICTOR: updike, with a blow to the back of thomas's head when she wandered off to eat a tangerine.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 i bet there are more composite authors out there. hazard a guess! who's secretly a collective?
02 have you ever read scarlett thomas? what did you think?
03 had you a major or majors?
04 tolstoy or chekhov, internet: you must pick one.
05 if you were the beast of gévaudan, what sort of person would you eat?
06 is skepticism re: capital-p Philosophy a character flaw?
*previous battle here.
**CZ is an actual person, mind you, but - just trust me here.
***joe was a poli sci / philosophy major. or he minored in philosophy. i could never keep it straight.
****"'Tolstoy, being rich, thinks that living like a peasant is virtuous in its simplicity. But Chekhov's been there and done that. He's eaten goose soup so thin that he says the only substance in it is like the scum you get in a bath after fat market women have been in it. He has slept in troughs.'"
01.09.11
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 32
SURVIVOR: rabbit at rest (john updike)*
CHALLENGER: a discovery of witches (deborah harkness)
i have seen the future of pop culture's sudsy love affair with vampires, and it is big - norma desmond big, with gloria swanson eyebrows and dramatic, glassware-endangering gestures. it's for twilight moms and grad students, for recovering goths and people who secretly like forrest gump.** it's moving and cheesy, like overturned fondue. it's - about a library book.
oxford is one of my favorite settings, of course, and the bodleian is an especially excellent bit of it; my nineties hair and i swore an oath (seriously, they make you swear an oath) not to "kindle therein any fire or flame" to become a reader there when i was a local, and i love kindling fires and flames.
one needn't be a brit- or book-lover to take a shine to a discovery of witches, though; we're but sixteen pages in when matthew clairmont - ancient vampire, knight, biologist, oxford don, ladykiller, oenophile, and (spoiler) yoga enthusiast - glides into the library. he's ten times older than stephenie meyer's edward cullen, and considerably more dreamy from a non-tween perspective: he does the requisite secretly-watching-his-lady-while-she-sleeps, playing it chaste, and brooding about exes he's killed, sure, but he has a slammin' wine cellar**** (harkness's vampires haven't much use for food, but they love wine) and has whiled away the millennia by gadding about with folks like kit marlowe, chuck darwin, and everyone mentioned in "we didn't start the fire." her highly entertaining maximalism leaves me more than willing to power through her love scenes.
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 32
SURVIVOR: rabbit at rest (john updike)*
CHALLENGER: a discovery of witches (deborah harkness)
i have seen the future of pop culture's sudsy love affair with vampires, and it is big - norma desmond big, with gloria swanson eyebrows and dramatic, glassware-endangering gestures. it's for twilight moms and grad students, for recovering goths and people who secretly like forrest gump.** it's moving and cheesy, like overturned fondue. it's - about a library book.
My degree from Oxford, my position at Yale, and my carefully researched and written books had long provided meaning and structure to my life. But none of them were of comfort to me in this strange new world of menacing vampires and threatening witches.a discovery of witches debuts diana bishop, an american scholar visiting oxford to research a paper on the history of alchemy. she's also an orphaned, non-practicing member of a powerful family of witches, and in the course of a routine day at the bodleian library, she manages to summon ashmole 782, a crazy-powerful book acquired by the bod from the ashmolean museum and lost centuries ago. she doesn't appreciate its significance, what with her shunning of all things witch-related, but she catches on quickly after the book is returned to the stacks and all hell breaks loose in the selden end of duke humfrey's reading room. all three races of creatures (that would be witches, vampires, and daemons; in this universe, one in ten beings is a creature rather than a human) are desperate to get their hands on ashmole 782, and diana's days of spending hours in the library, wearing comfortable-but-flattering yoga pants and striking jewel-tone turtlenecks, enjoying complicated glasses of wine, and making questionably-integrated references to famous scientific and literary works - her BVB*** ones, anyway - are over.
oxford is one of my favorite settings, of course, and the bodleian is an especially excellent bit of it; my nineties hair and i swore an oath (seriously, they make you swear an oath) not to "kindle therein any fire or flame" to become a reader there when i was a local, and i love kindling fires and flames.
one needn't be a brit- or book-lover to take a shine to a discovery of witches, though; we're but sixteen pages in when matthew clairmont - ancient vampire, knight, biologist, oxford don, ladykiller, oenophile, and (spoiler) yoga enthusiast - glides into the library. he's ten times older than stephenie meyer's edward cullen, and considerably more dreamy from a non-tween perspective: he does the requisite secretly-watching-his-lady-while-she-sleeps, playing it chaste, and brooding about exes he's killed, sure, but he has a slammin' wine cellar**** (harkness's vampires haven't much use for food, but they love wine) and has whiled away the millennia by gadding about with folks like kit marlowe, chuck darwin, and everyone mentioned in "we didn't start the fire." her highly entertaining maximalism leaves me more than willing to power through her love scenes.
"What spell have you put on me?" He searched my face. "It's not simply your eyes--though they do make it impossible for me to think straight--or the fact you smell like honey." He buried his face in my neck, the fingers of one hand sliding into my hair while the other drifted down my back, pulling my hips toward him.a discovery of witches, per its prepublication material, is to be translated into 32 languages; while i haven't seen explicit references to additional books, i'm guessing it's the first installment of a trilogy. this is excellent news; along with BBC three's marvelous being human, it's the most enthusiastic mixed-species drama i've come upon in some time, and a fine antidote to twilight's regressive tween-baiting. go forth, ms. harkness, and steamroll some YA fiction; scholars is pimps, too.
My body softened into his, as if it were meant to fit there.
VICTOR: harkness is the clear crowd favorite, but updike's superior descriptors, emotional plausibility, and lack of yoga carry the day. work on the love scenes, d-harks, and call me.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 vampire yoga: are you in?
02 wine-drinkers, which adjectives would one toss about for the sort of wines you like? i favor spanish reds which are elegiac, chatterley, and cheap.
03 did you buy chatterley as an adjective just then?
04 is nineties hair lauren up there a vampire, a witch, or a daemon? which sort of creature would you be?
05 have you seen being human? do you plan to watch syfy's american adaptation?
*previous battle here.
**i've met a few. terrifying.
***Before Vampire Boyfriend.
****harkness is both a wine blogger and a historian of science. her dinner-and-wine-tasting scenes are lengthy and top chef-esque; i enjoy them immensely.
09.02.10
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 23
SURVIVOR: tree of smoke (denis johnson)*
CHALLENGER: black swan green (david mitchell)
i like david mitchell (an englishman)'s black swan green, a novel about being thirteen in worcestershire in the early eighties, even more than i liked number9dream, a novel about being nineteen in tokyo in the sortafuture. i like it so very much that i imagine i'll prefer it to cloud atlas, his violently celebrated novel about...being at least nine ages in nine places, or so i hear. this is an intellectual failing, if the guardian's steven poole is to be believed.
black swan green, as i was saying, is lovely. mitchell does a fine job of turning out a young narrator, jason taylor, who's eloquent and inarticulate in plausible proportions. jason happens to stammer (as does mitchell, apparently; he's done some fascinating interviews with groups like the british stammering association); in his mind, his stammer is an actual character (called hangman), and the way he choreographs his speech to dodge hangman's strangling fingers is cleverly done. the way an elderly belgian woman (a character from cloud atlas, as it happens) gives him shit for using look-at-me phrases in the poetry he writes in secret for the parish magazine, in turn, is hilarious, particularly since he regularly sneaks them into his descriptions of his neighborhood ("Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon."):
VICTOR: black swan green - not because mitchell mopped THUNDERTOME with johnson, but because at the end of the day, the empress can execute whomever she likes.
THUNDERTOME: ROUND 23
SURVIVOR: tree of smoke (denis johnson)*
CHALLENGER: black swan green (david mitchell)
i like david mitchell (an englishman)'s black swan green, a novel about being thirteen in worcestershire in the early eighties, even more than i liked number9dream, a novel about being nineteen in tokyo in the sortafuture. i like it so very much that i imagine i'll prefer it to cloud atlas, his violently celebrated novel about...being at least nine ages in nine places, or so i hear. this is an intellectual failing, if the guardian's steven poole is to be believed.
There is a certain kind of novel-reader who likes to engage the muscles of empathy, but not those of ratiocination. In the US Black Swan Green has been welcomed with relief by some who are pleased that it seems to represent a shucking-off of the ebullient architectural and fabular playfulness on display in Mitchell's previous work. See, they say, that annoying postmodern stuff was never really necessary. In fact, the playfulness is still there: the author has just snuck it under their radar by turning the dial down, from nine to about three.don't be fooled; while it sounds like poole is giving black swan green fans a pass, he concludes by damning the book with faint praise.
Perhaps Mitchell has confined himself to such a rigidly conventional format - one year in the life of one boy in one village is almost a set of Aristotelian unities for a novel - as a kind of exercise, as though a talented painter were to spend a year filling in the crude line-drawings of a child's colouring book in order to concentrate on brushwork and palette. The result is impressive, but it makes one wait even more eagerly for the next large canvas.say, i wonder what poole would have to say about denis johnson (an american)'s bone-dry noir in nobody move after the extravaganza of the bookprizetastic tree of smoke.
After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off some steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can't help slathering the story's pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance.who was it who attempted to compliment meg white back in the day by saying she knew when not to drum? i'm also reminded of my oxford poetry tutor, a formidable woman who loved the sonnet i wrote about a gay biker i met at home in california and sicced her corpulent lap dog on me when i gave her a new piece on the high street chimneys i could see from my garden in england. but surely that's neither here nor there.
[...]
He knows what to leave out, as well as what to put in. Reaching the end, the exhilarated reader is blindsided by the hint of something huge.
black swan green, as i was saying, is lovely. mitchell does a fine job of turning out a young narrator, jason taylor, who's eloquent and inarticulate in plausible proportions. jason happens to stammer (as does mitchell, apparently; he's done some fascinating interviews with groups like the british stammering association); in his mind, his stammer is an actual character (called hangman), and the way he choreographs his speech to dodge hangman's strangling fingers is cleverly done. the way an elderly belgian woman (a character from cloud atlas, as it happens) gives him shit for using look-at-me phrases in the poetry he writes in secret for the parish magazine, in turn, is hilarious, particularly since he regularly sneaks them into his descriptions of his neighborhood ("Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon."):
"Beautiful words ruin your poetry. A touch of beauty enhances a dish, but you throw a hill of it into the pot! No, the palate becomes nauseous. You belief a poem must beautiful, or it can have no excellence. I am right?"both she and jason ("Once a poem's left home it doesn't care about you") have fine things to say about poetry; mitchell has fine things to say about the falklands, and bullying, and hauntings, and moon-gray cats (who pop up just often enough to be pleasing rather than gimmicky - i'm looking at you, john irving). black swan green is cleverly quotidian, clumsily dashing, and occasionally painfully pitch-perfect; as a few readers have noted, it could be literature's answer to my so-called life. steven poole can suck it. from daniel zalewski (an american, if i'm not mistaken):
[...]
"Beauty is not excellence. Beauty is distraction, beauty is cosmetics, beauty is ultimately fatigue. Here"--she read from the fifth verse--"'Venus swung bright from the ear of the moon.' The poem has a terminal deflation. Ffffffffft! Dead tire. Automobile accident. It says, 'Am I not a pretty pretty?' I answer, 'Go to the hell!' If you have a magnolia in a moonlight courtyard, do you paint its flowers? Affix the flashy-flashy Christmas lights? Attach plastic parrots? No. You do not."
[A]s a reader, I don't want to be without the verbal play and inventiveness of the generation that came before Mitchell's. There has got to be a way to write fiction that pays attention to people at the same time that it represents the breadth and complexity of the kinds of societies we live in now. Mitchell is the rare novelist who makes me see that path clearly: it starts among suburban houses, passes through a meadow where boys are fighting, and somewhere up ahead leads into a shrinking wood, populated by ghosts on skates, lunatic beekeepers and Gypsies crouched around a dying fire.
VICTOR: black swan green - not because mitchell mopped THUNDERTOME with johnson, but because at the end of the day, the empress can execute whomever she likes.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 do you think british reviewers expect more of british authors (and british audiences) than they do of american ones? i realize how broad that question is, but hey, i'm american.
02 have you ever been mauled by a lap dog?
03 why are the english so possessive of their urban symbols?
04 fellow poem-writing types, are you guilty of the flashy-flashy?
05 would you be interested in joining up with GRAVITY'S RAINBeh, a gravity's rainbow-reading support group for folks who tend to get tripped up around the banana pancakes scene? we'll read about fifty pages a week, i think; i'll post a weekly introduction and a few questions in dedicated posts here on the 'champ, and anyone and everyone are invited to read along and comment, provided you don't read ahead (brothers karamazov reading group, i'm looking at you). hateration, holleration encouraged.
*previous battle here.
03.25.09: bed bugs, fin (?)
we have a rather curious thursday ahead of us: the exterminators will be giving whatever bed bug-related nonsense remains in our apartment a second walloping sometime between 10 and 2 (i'm hoping for something in the middle, since we have to spirit the cats to the vet for boarding and perform a few operations on the bed to be sure we don't rip our costly new encasements), my mother and her boyfriend will be coming in from california to run around with us for the weekend, and morrissey will be joining us at carnegie hall to...do whatever he does when he's not canceling performances. what would that be, exactly? i've spent the majority of my life wanting to see it, and am still processing the fact that i will. i haven't got a stitch to wear.
the world became a better place when i stopped worrying about infesting my books and started reading again (i seal each one back up in a ziploc bag before i go to sleep, which - listen, i want these bugs gone). i'm glad i managed to read watchmen before i saw the movie, as said movie was thus a little less ridiculous. i'm extra-glad i then started brideshead revisited, which has been a marvelous and much-needed virtual tour of oxford,* where joe and i met and were married (our tenth anniversary** is in less than a month, and since there's pretty much no way we can afford to get there in person, i've been feeling extra-nostalgic). unfortunately, this particular order of things has pretty much ruined the eventual viewing of last year's brideshead revisited movie, for the english actor matthew goode (extra-foppy ozymandias in watchmen) is charles ryder, too. how am i supposed to take that seriously? charles ryder is a pretty foppy character as well, mind you, but man.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what did you think of watchmen (book or movie)? what got you through the dan and laurie love scenes (textual or onscreen, really)?
02 what does one wear to see morrissey?
03 is the brideshead movie any good?
04 how do you celebrate (dating, wedding, civic, fill-in-the-blank) anniversaries?
we have a rather curious thursday ahead of us: the exterminators will be giving whatever bed bug-related nonsense remains in our apartment a second walloping sometime between 10 and 2 (i'm hoping for something in the middle, since we have to spirit the cats to the vet for boarding and perform a few operations on the bed to be sure we don't rip our costly new encasements), my mother and her boyfriend will be coming in from california to run around with us for the weekend, and morrissey will be joining us at carnegie hall to...do whatever he does when he's not canceling performances. what would that be, exactly? i've spent the majority of my life wanting to see it, and am still processing the fact that i will. i haven't got a stitch to wear.
the world became a better place when i stopped worrying about infesting my books and started reading again (i seal each one back up in a ziploc bag before i go to sleep, which - listen, i want these bugs gone). i'm glad i managed to read watchmen before i saw the movie, as said movie was thus a little less ridiculous. i'm extra-glad i then started brideshead revisited, which has been a marvelous and much-needed virtual tour of oxford,* where joe and i met and were married (our tenth anniversary** is in less than a month, and since there's pretty much no way we can afford to get there in person, i've been feeling extra-nostalgic). unfortunately, this particular order of things has pretty much ruined the eventual viewing of last year's brideshead revisited movie, for the english actor matthew goode (extra-foppy ozymandias in watchmen) is charles ryder, too. how am i supposed to take that seriously? charles ryder is a pretty foppy character as well, mind you, but man.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 what did you think of watchmen (book or movie)? what got you through the dan and laurie love scenes (textual or onscreen, really)?
02 what does one wear to see morrissey?
03 is the brideshead movie any good?
04 how do you celebrate (dating, wedding, civic, fill-in-the-blank) anniversaries?
*per evelyn waugh, "the turf in hell passage knew [charles and sebastian] well." that's right, y'all: we not only made everyone go to a bar after we got hitched, we sent them down hell passage (eventually renamed st. helens) to do it.
**dating, not wedding: we've only been married for two years and change. not yet that old.
08.31.06
internet cafes don't lend themselves to long posts about wedding vacations, so haiku will have to suffice for now. there will be much to say when we get back to the states on saturday - what an odd, wonderful trip.
(oxford)
the first wormhole i
build will take me from new york
to the chequers inn.
(glasgow)
a merchant marine
bought us shots of aftershock,
shouting HONEYMOON!
(belfast)
xanax for belfast?
please? beautiful place, nowhere
close to normalcy.
(london)
a well-loved old shoe:
a bit scuffed, a bit stinky,
but a perfect fit.
internet cafes don't lend themselves to long posts about wedding vacations, so haiku will have to suffice for now. there will be much to say when we get back to the states on saturday - what an odd, wonderful trip.
(oxford)
the first wormhole i
build will take me from new york
to the chequers inn.
(glasgow)
a merchant marine
bought us shots of aftershock,
shouting HONEYMOON!
(belfast)
xanax for belfast?
please? beautiful place, nowhere
close to normalcy.
(london)
a well-loved old shoe:
a bit scuffed, a bit stinky,
but a perfect fit.
08.22.06
101 in 1001: 015 drink a pint of ale in oxford for my grandfather [completed 08.20.06]
matrimony accomplished! i think it will be some time before i'm able to recall sunday properly - it's true that a bride remembers her wedding day in weird flashes at first, if at all, though i do have a memory of saying something about luggage in my speech - but i can say that we can't be happier with how things turned out, and we're shocked and thrilled that we pulled it off. that's thanks in no small part to jen, who nominated herself as our wedding stage manager and could have a long and illustrious career producing badass nuptials if she so chose, to magnificent stephanie of the stanford house, and to friends and fam who stepped up fantastically to be part of our plans. i'm loath to blog an academy awards speech, so i'll leave it at that for now, but our readings are up at ye olde lauren and joe wedding site if you choose to peruse.
we walked from the turf tavern (mid-celebration drinks in honor of my grandfather) to freud (the reception site) instead of taking cabs with our guests, and it was the nicest stroll i've ever taken. i'd thrown my denim motorcycle jacket over my wedding dress and had a book bag and a cigarette along with my bouquet, but i looked bridely enough (what with the dapper joe in his suit and matching buttonhole) that we were recognized and applauded (loudly, with english brio) all through oxford; a couple even asked if they could take a picture with us (hell yeah they could). i might throw my dress on once a week or so for the rest of my life; being congratulated by kebab vans was a singular joy.
i'm joe's wife! holy shit!
101 in 1001: 015 drink a pint of ale in oxford for my grandfather [completed 08.20.06]
matrimony accomplished! i think it will be some time before i'm able to recall sunday properly - it's true that a bride remembers her wedding day in weird flashes at first, if at all, though i do have a memory of saying something about luggage in my speech - but i can say that we can't be happier with how things turned out, and we're shocked and thrilled that we pulled it off. that's thanks in no small part to jen, who nominated herself as our wedding stage manager and could have a long and illustrious career producing badass nuptials if she so chose, to magnificent stephanie of the stanford house, and to friends and fam who stepped up fantastically to be part of our plans. i'm loath to blog an academy awards speech, so i'll leave it at that for now, but our readings are up at ye olde lauren and joe wedding site if you choose to peruse.
we walked from the turf tavern (mid-celebration drinks in honor of my grandfather) to freud (the reception site) instead of taking cabs with our guests, and it was the nicest stroll i've ever taken. i'd thrown my denim motorcycle jacket over my wedding dress and had a book bag and a cigarette along with my bouquet, but i looked bridely enough (what with the dapper joe in his suit and matching buttonhole) that we were recognized and applauded (loudly, with english brio) all through oxford; a couple even asked if they could take a picture with us (hell yeah they could). i might throw my dress on once a week or so for the rest of my life; being congratulated by kebab vans was a singular joy.
i'm joe's wife! holy shit!
03.29.06
and the killer wedding robot lumbers forward: i finally dropped off the first batch of our save the date cards. a clever friend tells me i'm supposed to send one to myself to see if/how they come through; i neglected to do this, so do let me know if you receive one, eh? i haven't trusted the post office with much since they killed my tadpoles in 1998 (grow a frog kits should NOT be available online).
one last addition to the photo set from our trip. if you were leaving our wedding in the super-secret back garden and heading for the pub (which is, in fact, exactly what we will encourage guests to do), you would see this:
and the killer wedding robot lumbers forward: i finally dropped off the first batch of our save the date cards. a clever friend tells me i'm supposed to send one to myself to see if/how they come through; i neglected to do this, so do let me know if you receive one, eh? i haven't trusted the post office with much since they killed my tadpoles in 1998 (grow a frog kits should NOT be available online).
one last addition to the photo set from our trip. if you were leaving our wedding in the super-secret back garden and heading for the pub (which is, in fact, exactly what we will encourage guests to do), you would see this:
03.23.06 [all holes filled]
that's more like it! many thanks to paul, kidchamp's de facto webmaster, for twirling the digital spaghetti that is this site. he even managed to save pensive girl, which means a lot - i was heartbroken when a similar breakdown ate my 'guy who got punched' art a few years ago.
so, then. back to the poop. the dirty dozen [part 2]:
005 101 in 1001: 065 (re)visit 221b baker street [completed 03.16.06]
in the mid '80s, my family was obsessed with jeremy brett as sherlock holmes in the mystery! series;* it was a gimme that we'd visit the sherlock holmes pub at 221b on our trip to london in '95. then (and when i visited again in '99) it was a restaurant / pub / museum for the series - we saw the holmes mannequin from the empty house upstairs, they had one of the corny phosphorescent dogs from the hound of the baskervilles behind the bar, it was awesome. our pilgrimage this time around was disappointing, as the pub was gone and the museum was locked up for the night. good thing "(re)visit" is fairly vague, innit?
006 101 in 1001: 012 write (publish) a mcsweeney's list [completed 03.15.06]
official word rolled in while we were in oxford last week:
007 snaps of the sherlock holmes trip, as well as several artful portraits of joe and my mom drinking, are up in an oxford / london photo set. it isn't quite as large as it might have been, as i had to save memory stick space for umpteen photos of the wedding ceremony and reception sites, but hey. how could photos of mom drinking be less than satisfying?
008 when we retrieved the cats from the vet's place on saturday, he mentioned that he'd done "two extractions" during chuck's dental work. fine, i thought, i'd actually expected it to be much worse - chuck's breath had been like an open grave for a month or two. we get the cat home, he yawns and smells of roses, and we see...one fang, because "two extractions" actually means "i pulled out three of your cat's fangs." poor chuck has one big tooth left, on the bottom, and looks like a (very very cute) gargoyle. that's normally the sort of thing you'd mention to a client when discharging their pet, right? i'm sure the teeth needed to go, but we...need a new vet.
*mystery!'s excellent opening sequence began my love affair with edward gorey; when my sister agreed to do the illo for our save the date cards, i asked her to take her cues from him. we like our weddings spooky.
that's more like it! many thanks to paul, kidchamp's de facto webmaster, for twirling the digital spaghetti that is this site. he even managed to save pensive girl, which means a lot - i was heartbroken when a similar breakdown ate my 'guy who got punched' art a few years ago.
so, then. back to the poop. the dirty dozen [part 2]:
005 101 in 1001: 065 (re)visit 221b baker street [completed 03.16.06]
in the mid '80s, my family was obsessed with jeremy brett as sherlock holmes in the mystery! series;* it was a gimme that we'd visit the sherlock holmes pub at 221b on our trip to london in '95. then (and when i visited again in '99) it was a restaurant / pub / museum for the series - we saw the holmes mannequin from the empty house upstairs, they had one of the corny phosphorescent dogs from the hound of the baskervilles behind the bar, it was awesome. our pilgrimage this time around was disappointing, as the pub was gone and the museum was locked up for the night. good thing "(re)visit" is fairly vague, innit?
006 101 in 1001: 012 write (publish) a mcsweeney's list [completed 03.15.06]
official word rolled in while we were in oxford last week:
At long last we have finalized the lineup for our forthcoming book Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists that is scheduled for publication through Vintage in September of this year, and I'm pleased to report that at least one of your lists has been chosen for this volume.again, yay for vague wording: i was aiming for some action on the website, but this is listastic as well. it's even better, really, as i'll 1) be earning $25 for my efforts, 2) appear in mainstream print for the first (and probably last) time, and 3) get to use the phrase "mountain man dance moves" on my resume if the spirit moves me. as the moat girls would say, how good?!
007 snaps of the sherlock holmes trip, as well as several artful portraits of joe and my mom drinking, are up in an oxford / london photo set. it isn't quite as large as it might have been, as i had to save memory stick space for umpteen photos of the wedding ceremony and reception sites, but hey. how could photos of mom drinking be less than satisfying?
008 when we retrieved the cats from the vet's place on saturday, he mentioned that he'd done "two extractions" during chuck's dental work. fine, i thought, i'd actually expected it to be much worse - chuck's breath had been like an open grave for a month or two. we get the cat home, he yawns and smells of roses, and we see...one fang, because "two extractions" actually means "i pulled out three of your cat's fangs." poor chuck has one big tooth left, on the bottom, and looks like a (very very cute) gargoyle. that's normally the sort of thing you'd mention to a client when discharging their pet, right? i'm sure the teeth needed to go, but we...need a new vet.
*mystery!'s excellent opening sequence began my love affair with edward gorey; when my sister agreed to do the illo for our save the date cards, i asked her to take her cues from him. we like our weddings spooky.
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