Fiction

[madupont]

I give up.
Nevertheless, here is a book that is, in all actuality, non-fiction but was done by a writer who had never written fiction and so she couched it as if it were, or began to present as her attempt to write a novel, although it is really the story of herself and her family  being interned following Pearl Harbor. 
                     I probably would have placed in Obama Administration for comparative reasons of a discussion but that was yesterday; a discussion in which lack of comprehension of the causative factors to explain how a total continent's persecution of social, racial, religious difference took place leads to excuses and irrational counterproductive misrepresentations of history.

But, in the interim, overnight, the discussion has moved on to our security systems. Primarily in regard to air-travel but then how safe are we in general if we are under threat, which we seem to think that we are
-- yet, in reality the problem remains that we had the security risk threats in both cases(one the fictional account of a non-fiction history by Otsuka) defined for us and declared to us by the respective Commanders in Chief who were Presidents at the time of defining (the axis of evil)etc.  Otsuka happens to mention the ultimate fall back excuse for internment, detention,incarceration as "it is being done to protect you".  From what? From whom? In both cases, and more and more obviously often, from Americans.  Of course, I think that should be obvious by now, at the end of the first year of the administration of a president who makes waves and then dives into them whenever he can get back to Hawaii.

http://pages.email.powells.com/Publish.aspx?qs=71b8883ce06d4a8594ed8246ace5c1376d8ca94046283b2c6791b043d912e11b6e41610fae0a96f572d005235e5fa9059ceb99086a235be50ec775807504dfdfdc029b8bf57bef342ad2832d0823c8c93feed27673ced9e267d4c70cb1a3030d0b834c187c33ef2937da91dd7a632ef1a298635aad7aebbd9235385d1ab7f9f7106facccb9f0b26dda08ce80a04fdb71

[madupont]

Had recently watched The Merchant of Venice (starring Al Pacino) which was quite good.

Also reading Thomas Mann's Felix Krull - I must like Mann for I've just ordered The Magic Mountain (having read Dr Faustus earlier in the year).

Nabokov's The Original of Laura arrived about ten days ago - hmmm...not convinced as yet that there's not a dupin' on the horizon. Got Speak, Memory coming in a book delivery-fest over the next few days (including aforementioned Mann, Proust x 6, The Man Without Qualities, In the Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and a couple of others).

I saw that as well but back when; more addiction to Jeremy Irons than Al Pacino who nevertheless finally makes the role understandable although he mugs and apes, etc. the way every actor is told not to do. I did Portia for Merchant -- or rather, for the the Lighthouse for the Blind recordings, so I didn't have to worry about facial "mugging" nor memorization for that matter, just doing the reading.

Which "dupin" did you have in mind?  It means several different things nowadays.  Originally it was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baroness
Dudevant.  About ten years ago Diane Kurys made a film, Enfants du siecle, starring Juliette Binoche.  Have not yet seen; sounds much more realistic than Judy Davis and Hugh Grant (although Franz Liszt is probably the  best role for Julian Sands).

Anyway, hope you had a Merry Christmas, now that we are on the verge of another New Year?

[Beppo]

Beppo. Are you sure the Walden Books guy was fluent in English? Time to loudly ask for the manager of the store.

Righto DNR, that was whiskerspriest that had the broken copy of the book - I don't know if it was a second hand store where the manager just laughs atya when you show him the 50 pages in French (and points to a sign behind the counter that says 'All broken copies non-refundable") but most definitely, under most circumstances, I'd be squealing for a boss to fix the situation quicker than quick. I did once know a guy who spent a fair amount of time in a gated community (prison) and he said some prisoners were prone to ripping pages out near the end of books, I think, just so you could experience broken all for yourself. As if being prison doesn't somehow alert you to that experience already. Who do you take that complaint to?

[Beppo]

Anyway, hope you had a Merry Christmas, now that we are on the verge of another New Year?

And you. The dupin' was just a reference to the potential wool being pulled over some eyes by Dmitri Nabokov: his initial comments about The Original of Laura - "the most distilled concentration..." etc...

ps. I did end up giving the Bassani book as a gift - the recipient told me they had it on their Amazon wishlist...

[Beppo]

The Stephen Greenblatt book on Shakespeare is great for its focus on Shakespeare's ordinariness; his everydayness; his potential tight-fistedness; his borrowings; his mistakes; his involvements outwith of writing; his business acumen, all the while being aware, that he was Shakespeare. I confess I don't know if those last few words in that previous sentence make sense but Greenblatt does say that Shakespeare possibly knew (as much as you can know these kinds of things) that he was Shakespeare. Ah, it does and it doesn't make sense.

One can't help ponder the slow uptake of William Shakespeare as an icon. Why did a couple of generations pass before someone attached more than just an above-average shelf-life to his work?   

[madupont]

I think it is very possible for someone writing at that rate of intensity as he had for the popular theatre, to know who he is.

When you consider how many new performances he had to churn out to keep his public happily entertained or intensely moved. The mention of a couple of generations passing possibly arose simultaneously to actors preparing themselves, over and over again, new actors coming forth, competing against each other's past performances, to outdo each other as "the Actor of the Age".

I know that I was far too impressed at much too young an age with the sudden appearance of Olivier's Hamlet.  Then one watches everything he does, how he plays Richard III, and Henry V.    This, of course, made it impossible for me to watch Branagh  whatsoever.  Gradually seeing the latter play "himself" so to speak, as an actor of modern parts, I could go back and put up with his Shakespearean "strutting upon the stage. But it just wasn't the same colorful Hammy acting that Olivier got himself caught up in. Two of his most awful were in black-face, as Othello, and later  the Mahdi in the film, Khartoum.  In retrospect, it seems so corny when you happen to catch it on tv; but, back then it was glorious.  He was a magnificent director too, insisting on the building of a  track of smaller gauge rail to make the camera keep up with the charge of the horses as the opposing sides advance on the battlefield at Agincourt.  (Likewise, his St. Crispin's Day speach on Bosworth field was unsurpassed.)

Now watch, whiskeypriest will pop up and tell me how I have reversed the roles and I do not doubt it as it was a long time ago.

[Blythe]

Has anyone read, or have an interest in reading 2666 by Roberto Bolano?  It's strange and rather disconnected and ultimately fascinating.  I've read 3 of the 5 parts to the novel, none of which have more than a tenuous connection, and overlap in a way I'm uncertain of at this point. 

[madupont]

Blythe, 

There was a discussion but it was some time ago in The New Yorker.
Occasionally, i had the chance and the time to read some of what the readers there thought of the experience and  the way that they interpreted the experience.

ALSO check in  Latin American Literature where there probably are scattered remarks from those who read it.

[barton]

Blythe -- Elba regular Pugetopolis is quite interested in Bolano and 2666.  If you can rouse him from his wintry slumbers, I'm sure he'd be glad to chat with you.

[madupont]

Barton, he may have fallen though a crack in the northern California quake that occurred one week before the Haitian since they are on the same wave.

[Lhoffman]

He's in heavy with sci-fi noir just now....way cool stuff!

[barton]

Looks like that recluse up in New Hampshire has found himself an even better hiding place.

[madupont]

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957865,00.html

J.D. Salinger: "Keep Your Hands Off My Legacy"

[madupont]

The Hermit Crab of American Letters

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957492-1,00.html

[madupont]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989044-1,00.html

Books: Ah,Dull Revenge
(Monday, Sep. 07, 1998 )


Although those of us who loved reading Salinger -- ( I had immediately upon my return from New York in 1959, with a library-person connection [who later served on the mayoral town council] who was willing to have every copy fetched of  The New Yorker editions holding the vaunted tales of Salinger which I began to read seated in that library[in those days completely quiet, although I think perhaps Mackie emanated authority that commanded it],

there at a big modern blond wooden table, in an uncomfortable chair, I read every one of them, fascinated to be back in a world that I had just left behind in the East Coast metropolis with a little upper West side neighborhood that was strange but funny -- we were also fascinated by the rise and fall of Joyce Maynard, in a somewhat clandestine way, were
at the same time appalled in having invaded his privacy, Salinger's contract with us who are his readers, through the machination of a  predaceous   adolescent,  who turned out to be of totally inferior intellectual settlement after she had fooled us with nothing but her inflated self-ego in the first flush of pretentious eccentric delusion that the scholarship she was about to cast aside had proven her anything but vain.

Read on, and ponder. Perhaps pull up that nytimes Magazine article, although a shame you can not see the photo there. It is possibly on a book cover yet available.

Thinking back, not so far as that, this reminder serves to give thought again to the Polanski fall from grace by a similar personality in the female flesh, a predator whose mother declared her the victim to save face.