The Friday Article Roundup
An assembly line of this week's pop culture writing from around the Internet.
Churning out culture like:
Thanks to Just Jeremy Now and Dave for keeping the line moving this week with their contributions!
Speaking of which, the FAR is an eternal and all-seeing entity, but its vessel will change next week to Dave Shutton! Please send articles of interest throughout the next week to magpiesfar [at] gmail. As always, post articles from the past week in the comments for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At The Comics Journal, Ken Parille revisits a New Yorker cover by Chris Ware and argues for a more nuanced interpretation than what it received at the time:
This kind of reading ignores the possibility that we can find multiple, even contradictory ways to interpret the image. It simply turns Ware’s art into a “meaning.” This kind of approach often relies on viewers’ unexamined biases, especially assumptions about genre conventions and image formats. Magazine covers have often been treated as a form of advertising, as attention-getting visuals intended to sell product, not as art that demands slow and careful interpretive attention. Those critical of Ware defaulted to an expectation for covers of magazines like The New Yorker, whose images regularly make a visual joke or offer a cultural critique that we seem to “get” when we convert it into a verbal punchline….Reading Ware’s art through the lens of ‘visual allegory’ ignores what makes the drawing attractive, interesting, even strange.
As if La Jetée needed more time folding madness, there’s a new documentary about a man noticing that the fifth shot of the movie might actually be of himself and his family. Chris Marino reviews the film at ReverseShot:
The mystery of the fifth shot demands an investigation into the past, and Cabrera’s direct presentation of the archival material she finds allows the viewer to participate in this inquiry themselves. Family photos are consulted by the filmmaker in the identification of the three figures: is Jean-Henri’s mother’s haircut the same as that of the woman in La Jetée? Is the man standing with his father’s characteristic slanted posture? Does the boy have Jean-Henri’s protruding ears and skinny legs? Cabrera includes many pictures of her own parents as she considers the experience of their sudden migration to France. Old photos of Orly airport are used to determine where Chris Marker may have been standing when he snapped this still for La Jetée, while diaries and letters display production details that indicate when this photo could have been taken. Passports and identification documents reveal surprising coincidences, such as the fact that Davos Hanich, lead actor in La Jetée, is from the same town in Algeria, Sig, as Cabrera’s family. And we hear voices from old recorded interviews, including those of actress Helene Chatêlain discussing Chris Marker and director Alain Resnais praising La Jetée. Beyond their specific relevance to Cabrera’s investigations, these materials evoke an important function of cinema: its production of an archive of images and sounds which serves to preserve the past.
For Mubi, Adam Nayman memorializes the late Ted Kotcheff, the journeyman director of First Blood and Wake In Fright with a sensibility favoring the scrapper:
If Kotcheff’s overall reputation is less than stellar, it’s because, subtextual throughlines aside, a good percentage of his filmography is considered mediocre or worse. Exhibit A: Weekend at Bernie’s (1989), his only real commercial hit after First Blood and a critical punching bag that’s better than its reputation, shot through with many of the same themes of class anxiety, hustle, and ingenuity as Kotcheff’s ’70s comedies, albeit drenched in a sort of Day-Glo cynicism….The very definition of a one-joke movie—with the caveat that it keeps wringing inventive variations on that joke, which is that a stiff like Bernie is more fun dead than alive—Weekend at Bernie’s is tactless, tasteless, and consistently funny, deploying sight gags with assembly-line timing and precision. [Critic Daniel] Kremer smartly cites Blake Edwards as a precedent; Antonioni, whose own depictions of privileged and insular rituals were shaded with a degree of necrophilia, might have appreciated his old friend’s film as a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-the-Hamptons costume party.
Stereogum‘s Danielle Chelosky introduces us to The Velvet Sundown, an entirely AI-generated psych-rock band… or maybe they’re real?
The psych-rock “band” has two albums on their Spotify-verified profile: June 5’s Floating On Echoes and June 20’s Dust And Silence. The writing/production/performance credits list only the band’s name. And the bio consists of meaningless adages. “The Velvet Sundown aren’t trying to revive the past,” it reads. “They’re rewriting it. They sound like the memory of a time that never actually happened… but somehow they make it feel real.” An earlier version also included this made-up quote attributed to Billboard: “They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real.” Neither the Velvet Sundown nor its four members (“vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion ‘Rio’ Del Mar”) had social media until yesterday (June 27) when they created an Instagram. The pictures of the “band” are very obviously and disturbingly AI-generated. […] (From Band’s Twitter account): Absolutely crazy that so-called “journalists” keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is “AI-generated” with zero evidence. Not a single one of these “writers” has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm. This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul.
And Tanner Sterling sharpens the knives for poets who move into novel writing at Fence Digital:
What you find on the page are characters and situations that do more than betray the prevailing formulae of so-called literary fiction: they fail to break free of the expectations of autofiction that make the author the primary object of fascination. It starts with the characters, who are copied over from the professional and cultural milieus of their authors—and, consequently, possess many shared biographical details. The authors, in turn, must account for the overlapping likeness on the requisite book tour. That poets themselves are often conflated with the voices in their poems—indeed, that many poets are happy to be so—only intensifies the identification. The poet becomes speaker, becomes novelist-protagonist—the book tour a celebrified lecture series on the circular topic of novel-writing as self-promotion. Peppered with questions less to do with the text than with the authors’ own lives, they become less accountable to the books than their own careers. The anticipation of the content of the public fora, it seems to me, makes their books possible in the first place.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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What Did We Watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Sixteen, “In The Shadow of Z’Ha’Dum”
YES!!! YES!!!
Good episode, and as often, it comes down to another stunning reveal that almost makes up for the wheel-spinning; it’s hilarious, after a lifetime of LOST and its various influences, to have a show that actually pulls the payoff off much more effectively than the setup. Telling us who and what Kosh is fucking owns, especially since it feels so sudden, and the reveal that there’s been a second war underneath everything is some fun stuff. It also forces some good plot, both in the setup and, awesomely, in the payoff; Sheridan reveals his own romantic tendencies, more personal than Londo but no less passionate, when he finds out Morden may have information on his wife, and he’s forced to make the awful choice to give her up for the good of the galaxy, and it’s painful to watch; it’s even better that he decides to go for the galaxy, and to take down any enemy with him.
Meanwhile, Vyr is in a small but crucial role, and I enjoy him best when he’s mildly exasperated but doing his duty (I particularly love his snarky reaction to Morden’s “What do you want?”). I also still enjoy the corny self-seriousness of the show; this episode has a scene where Franklin seriously asks Ivanova whether or not she believes in God; she half-embarrassedly describes herself as an indifferent Jew, and he spouts exposition about his faith (invented for the show) that’s centered around God being harder to know the more you try and define it; it reminds me of both scenes in M*A*S*H where Father Mulcahey talks about it, and Dutch’s questions with Falks on The Shield.
It is mathematical, the greater the Kosh the greater an episode is. Why does Kosh, the largest alien, not simply eat the other cast and take over the show? Oh well. But Morden is no slouch either, Ed Wasser has the perfect look of clever innocence with shades of malevolence, a great manipulator (in contrast, our house absolutely despises 90s Mullet Security Second In Command, where the fuck did he come from and why does he have so much screen time? He’s such a needy douche of a performer). Which is why the Vyr bit you highlighted owns — the show has been making a lot of out Morden’s question as his way into manipulation, Kosh himself is appalled by it and rejects it but Vyr finds an answer that Morden can’t deliver on.
I was thinking that the episode manages to own hard despite not having either Londo or G’kar, and yeah, it is actually a lot of Kosh.
Young and Innocent
A very charming Hitchcock romp, with a “wrong man” plot, a romance with absolutely sparkling chemistry, and a lot of funny, tense scenes: the children’s party where ordinary family nosiness starts nudging into dangerous territory (with some brilliant use of blind man’s bluff) is especially good, but I’m also very fond of Robert Tisdall’s meeting with his inept lawyer. I’d try to slip out of the courtroom after that too. This is all marred by having some atrocious minstrel show blackface on the screen for an extended stretch of time near the climax; it really hurts what is otherwise a delightful movie. If you can get past that–and I certainly understand if someone can’t–pretty much everything else here is fun; the tone is very similar to The Lady Vanishes, one of my favorite Hitchcock films.
My wife commented, correctly, that this title sounds a bit creepy, but apparently the title for its initial US release was mind-bogglingly worse: The Girl Was Young. More like The Ticket-Buyer Was Uncomfortable.
Evil Under the Sun
Another sparkling crime story, this time lacking any major caveats! Bouncy, colorful Agatha Christie adaptation with gorgeous scenery and spectacular, over-the-top costume design that provides near-constant delight. Incredible cast, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot–and I always love Ustinov’s Poirot, he doesn’t look remotely how he “should” look, but he has the right intelligence and the right flexibility between fussiness and sharp seriousness, and Ustinov is just one of my favorite screen presences–aided by greats like Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, James Mason, Roddy McDowall, Jane Birkin, and more. Also, almost everyone on this island is magnificently catty, and I love it; McDowall and Smith are particularly fun on that front and make off with all the best lines.
All the food and fashion in Evil Under the Sun is so wonderfully grotesque / over the top. I think I slightly prefer Death on the Nile but they’re both great fun and I’m definitely pro-Ustinov-Poirot.
I’m glad you mentioned the food, because yes, that’s such gloriously grotesque food, and it really does feel of a piece with the costuming. At one point, a character puts her cigarette out on one of those tomatoes cut up like a flower, and all I could think was, “Good, at least it means you’re not going to eat that.”
Death on the Nile has the edge for me too. I think it’s my favorite Christie adaptation ever, beating Witness for the Prosecution by a nose.
Oof that’s a tough call. I love the 40s And Then There Were None, Witness for the Prosecution and I might just give the Albert Finney Orient Express the edge over the two Ustinovs although it’s very close. The real thing to take away here is “hell yeah Agatha Christie”.
Two Ustinovs? There are six! Three made for TV and set in the 80s, and one from Cannon Films after that. None of which as are as good but all have their moments.
Yeah I’d be very happy to check them out at some point! But I’ve only seen the Big Two.
Marty – A homely Italian butcher meets a plain Jane and has to push back against his mother and his best friend’s dislike of her. This won the 1955 Oscar more because Arthur Hecht and Burt Lancaster ran a successful campaign than because it’s that good (though it wasn’t really a great year and no one was going to give Bad Day at Black Rock an Oscar). But Ernest Borgnine is excellent as the put upon sad sack Marty, showing a degree of restrain usually absent from his work, and there is a lot of melancholy charm here, plus footage of a Bronx neighborhood that really does not exist anymore.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “Revenge” – Watch along with Lauren! Really good, taut little thriller with Vera Miles and Ralph Meeker, masterfully directed by the master. And also from 1955. Amazing that there is more sexuality in this than in all of Marty.
Sherlock & Daughter, “The Common Thread” – A somewhat better episode than the first part, but dear lord, Blu Hunt cannot act. Happily, David Thewlis can.
Frasier, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” – Shocked that Martin is going to propose to Sherry, Niles decides it’s a good time to hire a PI to learn more about her. Turns out Sherry’s been married six times. But also turns out Martin knows. Which leads to the real crux of things: Martin wants to get married again, Sherry doesn’t. And they break up. I guess the writers wanted to come up with both another point of conflict between the brothers and Martin, and a strong reason to end the relationship. It could have been enough to just have her say no. But the emotional beats, especially that of Frasier and Martin sharing a beer afterwards, work well. And bravo to Frasier for finally accepting that if it makes his dad happy, it’s good.
Loved getting your thoughts on “Revenge.”
I need to watch Marty at some point, because my main association with it has always been it appearing as a key wrong answer in Quiz Show. And I looked up the 1955 nominations slate after you said it was a weak year, and I haven’t even heard of any other nominees. That’s true for the first couple years of the Oscars, but after that, I generally know and have even seen a couple nominees per year. But not 1955!
Same. Best Director is a pretty strong slate but Best Picture is shrug after shrug.
That’s exactly my association with Marty.
I also only know of Marty in association with the agony in Herb Stemple’s voice: “No, Dan, not Marty.”
I can’t remember if I watched Marty because of the “unusual Oscar winner” consensus or despite it, but I absolutely loved it – such a wonderfully low-key, grumpy romance with a bunch of odd supporting players. There are plenty of other great films that year but I’m really glad they gave this one some recognition.
The Trip — finished the TV series as opposed to the movie made out of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s meals and meanderings, I haven’t seen the movie and feel like it could not give the space for the boys’ bits to really accumulate. Because this is Michelin star-worthy Dudes Rock material, the way our guys will riff on stuff that is overly familiar but still worth churning through because 1. there is gold to be found and 2. that’s how they actually communicate feelings. The fourth episode is especially great in this regard, going from the “To bed!” brilliance in the car to the dinner where they are joined by two women and they cannot help themselves from using the bits as peacocking material, it is cringeworthy but more importantly the direction of performance (and less invested audience) throws off the rhythm. Wonderful stuff and pretty much ideal TV, 30 minutes of hanging out at a time.
Out Of Sight — a rewatch of a classic. Kent Jones once wrote about The Friends Of Eddie Coyle’s brilliance and said something along the lines of how Coyle now is a film people use as an example of “they don’t make em like they used to” but the movie’s greatness is beyond a series of signifiers and stands alone; I think Out Of Sight is in a similar category. Yes, they don’t make spiffy Elmore Leonard adaptations with actual lighting and ridiculously deep casts and honest to god romantic chemistry anymore, but even in the allusions to other work (like Don’t Look Know) this becomes its own standard of crime excellence. You can make a movie with craft and skill but not have the instinct to make sure there are several minutes of Dennis Farina busting Michael Keaton’s balls, Soderbergh does have that instinct and that’s why they never made em like this since.
Yeah the way they condensed The Trip never made sense to me, it’s all about the extended period of time with these guys and really getting into their rhythms.
Out of Sight might be the most ridiculously deep casts ever. What would be its competition? It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World?
What Did We Read?
Fancied some more Dashiell Hammett so I grabbed the Continental Op short story collection. Think I’m going to dip in and out rather than going through the whole thing but the first story was fun, I like the idea of a mystery with TOO many clues.
Fuck yeah the Op! The shorts are really good and The House On Turk Street and The Girl With The Silver Eyes in particular are great, I’m sort of surprised the former wasn’t turned into a lean and mean crime/suspense flick at some point.
The Shadow Over Time, HP Lovecraft
This is the last of my favourite Lovecraft stories, and it’s largely because of the absolutely fucking boss idea at the centre – this is his imagination fully unleashed with a brilliant and wildly original horror premise, probably his most wildly original. It already starts with a premise of horror that strongly recalls sudden disability; the character lost five years and his relationship with his wife and two of his children, as well as any sense of reality, due to his mind and body suddenly failing him for no reason. The followup to this is extraordinary; that the narrator lost control of his body to an alien investigating his time.
This becomes a fusion between Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and his gift for truly alien aliens; the visuals he comes up with for the aliens and their civilisation are extraordinary, the giant conical creatures with claws and a viscous substance instead of legs, and his eye for architecture. Some of the alien’s daily tasks sound great – creating art, studying ancient history for things they like and want to replicate – and some are not – Lovecraft explicitly describes their government as ‘fascistic socialism’ and less explicitly describes their practices of eugenics.
What we effectively have are a few horrors mashed together; the conservative fear of one’s status quo being irreparably destroyed, put into the relatable form of being horribly disabled for a few years; the more abstract (though relatable in specific situations) fear of being trapped in an alien body and alien civilisation and enslaved in a gilded cage for five years; the cosmic horror of the end times given a specific date, and the recognition that not only could a time travelling race steal our bodies and trap us in a failing future, our civilisation isn’t even worth stealing. Our whole system of civilisation is cosmically pathetic.
This is fascinating in the broader context of Lovecraft’s work in that it comes off kind of sad and accepting rather than terror-inducing; one thing that’s been building up is that Lovecraft has been gradually inventing more complex societies that strike me as places he’d rather be living in; my objections to his fascism aside, it sounds he’s taking pleasure in the alien’s world. One possibility of where Lovecraft could have gone is easing out from the cosmic horror – as essential as it was to his career – and moving into fantasy ironically closer to the Lord Of The Rings or Dragonriders of Pern, based around worldbuilding and a fictional history as opposed to evoking horror as a main goal. I have seen speculation that not only would Lovecraft have deeply enjoyed the various TTRPGs based on his works, he would have had enormous fun generating sourcebooks for it, and I would agree.
On top of this, the story falters completely in its second half, having blown its wad on the premise and failing to find any inspiration literally wandering around the Australian outback.
I wonder, actually, if this is a logical outcome of starting with intense sensory feelings. Whatever you might say about Lovecraft, he followed his instincts and chased Recognition. It’s my observation that following Recognition tends to land you in exactly the opposite place than where you thought you wanted to be; Lovecraft started with explosive melodramatic emotion and landed in a mechanical, ordered universe just before he died. It’s worth considering.
The Manchurian Candidate, Richard Condon
This turned out to be a competent thriller with a cool central premise. If this has any value, it’s in the characterisation of Raymond and his mother (great touch that her name is used exactly once in the book and she’s otherwise referred to as ‘Raymond’s mother’ in the narration). Raymond is a very good characterisation of the kind of guy the internet is awash in; no empathy for any other human being, very little human feeling within him, no thought of anything outside the present moment – just a blunt object reacting to things. If he were born sixty years later, he’d be stringing together the dumbest memes on 4chan.
Lenin: A Biography, Robert Service
The story of, for better and worse, a Marxist visionary. Service makes it clear that, no matter how hypocritical and self-serving and arrogant he could be, Lenin was a Marxist true believer whose strength as a politician was combining complete certainty in his ideas with tactical flexibility; the major way this was expressed was how he pursued Marxism all his life but left articulation of the details as vague as he could, with his taking up of the New Economic Plan being a useful example to point at (though I would also use his wavering over whether or not socialism required capitalism first). Lenin’s take on politics could be seen as somewhere between Artist and Intellectual; Service characterises him as so dedicated to ideas that people themselves become vague abstractions (especially visible in his thoughtless indifference to the human cost to his decisions).
Service also argues that much of what made Lenin Lenin was his upbringing; his education-driven parents who fostered his intelligence, his father’s specific preoccupation with the Enlightenment, his family indulging many of his quirks and whims, and of course his brother being killed by the Tsar and causing his family to become pariahs. (One thing Service doesn’t suggest but seems possible to me is that Lenin’s dedication to highly organised statism is rooted partly in the way his brother was killed – an amateurish and overly ambitious bunch of students, though Service also sells that Lenin has a practical intelligence that he would have organised something)
It’s fascinating that Lenin’s approach to Marxism is actually similar to my approach to storytelling; heavily theoretical, with a few texts that serve as his holy bible, and a focus on generating as much interpretive text as possible; what Richard Reeves referred to as “conversations with himself” in discussing Nixon. Service observes that this gives Lenin a very strong internal drive that guides him through the troubling times; at the very end, Lenin goes into his death under complete conviction that he served his life’s purpose, even if he’s worrying about Stalin coming in and fucking it up.
Service also makes it clear that all this – his arrogance, his relatively rich family and privileged upbringing, his self-belief – all contributed to make him the world-shaking figure he became; Service argues that it’s Lenin more than anyone else who creates and pushes the success of the Bolsheviks, and he pushes an attitude of total dictatorship in which he is unquestioningly in charge and the order of authority and discipline is perfectly clear, pushing a culture of terror and oppression. Of course, it’s also clear that he benefits from good luck, up to and including the world he’s in; Russia is looking to abandon the Tsars in one way or another, and he manages to tap into that energy and send out solutions infused with sincere conviction. (There’s also moments of sheer luck, both militarily and domestic, like surviving being shot or dodging getting caught out of sheer coincidence).
Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope
This has all of Trollope’s strengths–humor, sympathy, low-key but deeply felt moral and interpersonal dilemmas, understanding of human foibles, and a pleasant authorial voice that captures and highlights all of the above. (I’m often frustrated and contrary whenever a text feels like it’s guiding me towards a particular reaction, but the great Victorian authors–and Doris Lessing, per my recent reading of The Grass Is Singing–have a gift for incorporating interpretation into presentation in a way that really works for me; it helps that they’re usually trying to bolster empathy rather than judgment. Trollope and George Eliot are two of my favorites for this, maybe because their worldviews are especially congenial to mine.)
This feels a tad weaker to me than the preceding Barsetshire books (I get the sense that I’m one of only a handful of Trollope fans who adore The Warden), but that’s not much of a slight; I still enjoyed this a lot. It’s also interesting to think that this is probably one of only a few books in the world where the emotional climax happens between a young woman and her future mother-in-law.
Two favorite bits of Trollope-as-commentator in this book:
* On the bailiffs apologizing for having come into someone’s house to seize all their furniture: To which one of them added a remark that, “business is business.” This statement I am not prepared to contradict, but I would recommend all men in choosing a profession to avoid any that may require an apology at every turn;—either an apology or else a somewhat violent assertion of right.
* Lucy, indeed, was not demonstrative; and she was, moreover, one of those few persons—for they are very few—who are contented to go on with their existence without making themselves the centre of any special outward circle. To the ordinary run of minds it is impossible not to do this. A man’s own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to every one else. A lady’s collection of baby-clothes, in early years, and of house linen and curtain-fringes in later life, is so very interesting to her own eyes, that she cannot believe but what other people will rejoice to behold it. I would not, however, be held as regarding this tendency as evil. It leads to conversation of some sort among people, and perhaps to a kind of sympathy. Mrs. Jones will look at Mrs. White’s linen-chest, hoping that Mrs. White may be induced to look at hers. One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it. For the most of us, if we do not talk of ourselves, or at any rate of the individual circles of which we are the centres, we can talk of nothing. I cannot hold with those who wish to put down the insignificant chatter of the world. As for myself, I am always happy to look at Mrs. Jones’s linen, and never omit an opportunity of giving her the details of my own dinners.
I find a lot of my favourite iconic English writers – Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen – tend to give commentary on the action, but their vision is so clear and so detached from the narrative that it ironically makes the author seem more of an independent observer, watching the action alongside us and giving their opinion without interfering. These extracts definitely fit into that idea.
(It’s an unfortunate nature of my talents and interest that I have to make my authorial voice completely invisible, but then that’s what essays are for)
Yeah, that sense of them observing it along with us, rather than interfering, is really key: it makes the authorial voice feel like company rather than instructor. There’s a part of Framley Parsonage where Trollope basically throws up his hands and admits that he can’t help feeling more sympathy for an antagonist than his characters do, and he gives his reasons for it, but there’s no sense he’s interfering with the story because of it. Now I want to reread some Douglas Adams with this in mind.
Same on the talents and interests. I really like reading this kind of thing, but I’d feel awkward doing it, and it doesn’t fit in well with what I generally want to write. But as you said, at least we’ll always have essays.
Love the examples of Trollope’s voice here and also the wry observational style — the tone and direct delivery are different but the sentiment of the bailiffs bit feels very Westlakian.
I’d never thought of comparing Westlake and Trollope, but now that you’ve said this, I feel like their senses of humor are actually pretty similar, too.
What absolutely classic Trollope in that second paragraph. I will stand with you on the parapet in defence of The Warden (but would be even more enthusiastic if it was Barchester Towers).
As well as the ludicrously long sentences, I also love his standalone novels with the amazing soap opera titles: Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right come to mind.
Barchester Towers is fantastic! It was great to see so much of Mrs. Proudie in Framley Parsonage, too.
And +1000 on Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right, as both novels and titles. He Knew He Was Right particularly, on the latter front: it’s so gleefully attention-grabbing. My wife and I joke that a disproportionate number of Victorian novels just default to using the main character’s name for the title, and Trollope would do that sometimes–Phineas Finn was my first Trollope, actually–but he could also come up with some all-time greats.
Plowing through Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, about the time between Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War. Or rather the start of the shooting. This is pretty strong on the “what” but not the “why.” Larson is clearly anti-slavery but seems to admire Southern “chivalry” too much and doesn’t quite know what to do with the Lincoln of 1861. But I am learning some things I did not know, and Larson can on occasion write a very good sentence.
Making my way through a biography of baseball manager Earl Weaver. Interesting enough for baseball fans, but his importance is not so great that I recommend it to anyone else the way I would a book about Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson.
Started a book about the fate of the Two Princes, and stopped once I realized it’s by a Riccardian. I don’t mind challenging the orthodoxies of historians, but I find Riccardians are less interested in setting the record straight and more interested in rewriting the record to match their point of view without actually backing it up.
The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chalmers — What was it that someone said recently, “I’m often frustrated and contrary whenever a text feels like it’s guiding me towards a particular reaction”? Chalmers is a very imaginative world-builder and handles tech with ease but she is definitely pushing the reader toward a sensibility and while I learned to live with it was still annoying. Also annoying but maybe more interesting is that Chalmers’ action in the story of a bunch of contractors taking the see title through space to drill a wormhole is focused on emotional labor more than physical labor, and this manifests in people telling each other how they feel. Which is healthy but makes for less compelling drama, and in fact had me yearning for purposeful withholding of emotion outside of specifically condoned areas for its expression. The book is a paean to tolerance of sexuality and species and sapient technology but it would have been better if the characters were straight white men on a boat in the Atlantic during the War of 1812.
I like this series and wish Chambers had kept going, but I can see why you weren’t into this. The other books are similar so you might want to stop here.
I feel like she is indebted to other authors and recognizes that, but her own work feels like an attempt to “improve” on things in some ways? I dunno, some of this is just my resistance to tolerance displayed in this fashion. Chambers wants to explore other ways of existing and in particular a more openly emotive and less lineal family, and she just keeps nudging this instead of letting it play out.
Started Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, the first Aubrey/Maturin novel I read. It starts the absolute best possible way, with Aubrey and Maturin meeting for the first time and immediately testing and annoying each other. You can tell these two are meant to be from the start, so I was surprised by Maturin being reluctant to take Aubrey’s offer to work on the Sophie. I must admit I’m still a bit lost with all the nautical and shipping terms in a way thatI didn’t with, say, Moby Dick. I think I’ll find my bearings soon enough.
OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS
YES! YES! “I think I’ll find my bearings soon enough” ahahahahahaha oh my no. The first book is purposefully dense as shit in this way and while Maturin provides an excuse for landlubber explanations a lot is stuff you just sort of pick up and in my case, pick up a vague comprehension but not working knowledge. Fun fact: That diagram of the ship in front of every book doesn’t help at all! Half of the sails the crew talk about aren’t even there or they are called by other names, hilarious.
But yes, right away the relationship is set. Dudes nearly duel because they are rocking too hard! And there is a nice little note of how their precarious situations at the time of their first meeting are playing into their anxiety, and how Jack’s mood is immediately improved by getting a ship (and Maturin’s mood by getting some food) — a man and a boat are both tested by the weather. So envious of you getting to read these for the first time! And standard recommendation: read the next two, Post Captain and HMS Surprise, fairly soon after this one, as they ease up on some of the nautical difficulty and flesh out the larger world Jack and Stephen live in (Post Captain spends a lot of time on land in Jane Austen territory, an extremely dangerous world for Jack) and also HMS Surprise is a total fucking banger. After that you’ll definitely have your sea legs and can dip into them at ease.
I read the diagram in full before starting the book, then said “Thanks, no”.
If I remember correctly I have a copy of both Post Captain and HMS Surprise. I doubt I’ll read all the book but doing the first three does sound pretty manageable. My guess is the actual meat of the movie is mostly in HMS Surprise, so I’m looking forward to make it at least to that point.
Oh, uh, do not go looking for the movie here! There is some HMS Surprise in there, a good amount of The Far Side Of The World (the tenth book) and bits and pieces of others — it is a superb adaptation of the spirit of the books and of the text as a whole, but not any one text in particular. EDIT: One of the best parts of the movie is how it opens with Jack and Stephen’s relationship already established and lived-in, as great as their meeting and bonding is it’s better to watch how the existing relationship is tested instead of spending a lot of time creating it.
Wooo, Patrick O’Brian!
Yeah, I gave up on getting my head around the nautical terms for the most part, but I do have Dean King’s A Sea of Words, the lexicon/companion, that I sometimes keep on hand when I’m reading O’Brian so I can at least dip in and out of it and look up anything that seems more important.
It’s been years since I read it, but I remember The Unknown Shore being a strong non-series novel, if you ever want a shorter dose of Patrick O’Brian.
Yes! You are in for such a treat. This is a book series that literally has everything – derring-do, parlour room manners, dad jokes, rotten boroughs, … , I could go on.
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner’s memoir about losing her mother to cancer and also food as memory and connection. Good stuff but very, very sad.
I started Stupid TV, Be More Funny, which kind of makes me feel stupid in that the only time I post I’m reading books it’s shit like this. Pretty early on, but it’s still remarkable how many things had to come together to even get this show made, let alone to make it what it would become. One interesting detail is that Sam Simon, who was a TV veteran at this point, purposely staffed the show with people who weren’t experienced TV writers, just people he found funny. (Simon’s reasoning: “If you’re funny, I can teach you how to write a half-hour show. And I don’t want people who have picked up bad habits.”)
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
Kinda feel like I need a “previously, on Hey Friends, What’s Up?” at this point. You’re all as invested in my romantic adventures as I am, right? Anyway, following the minor derailment after the first couple of dates and managing to get things back on course, we planned to go out for a meal as a PROPER date on Wednesday, but then also managed to sneak in a little bonus date on Monday and… there is definitely romantic chemistry going on now, woohoo! So glad we gave it another try. We’re still taking things slowly but it’s been so lovely and she seems just as excited to spend more time together as I am. But sadly not this weekend as her band has a gig in Paris (!? she is way cooler than me).
Hell yeah!
Such lovely news
The only way I could be more content with my life is if I didn’t have to work at all. As it is, I have all the time and space to do the things I care about with people I like.
Hell yeah, that’s great to hear! I’m increasingly finding myself working as little as I can get away with and I’m not sure it’s sustainable but… fuck ’em.
I really love this for you.
Counting down to the rescission bill. I have zero hope it dies the death it should. The good news? We’re getting a lot of donations. Probably not enough to stop more big budget cuts, but at least we do have friends out there.
My sister in law’s oldest son became a dad yesterday. That’s now 10 grand-nephews and grand-nieces. One of whom was apparently heavy enough that my mom porting him around the zoo threw her back out. She really underestimates how big he is.
And six weeks later, my GP finally called about my blood tests and is increasing my metformin dose. Yay.
I’m just going to kind of exist today.
I had a pretty good amount of nice tequila last night, so “kind of existing” is where I am at as well.
These kinds of days are very important
Well, my legs finally healed enough to go to the gym last night, so even though they still look pretty scaly, at least I can use them again. That’s good.
Nothing special happened for me in the poker tournaments I was hoping it would happen. On the other hand, I finally have an idea for something I want to create in terms of poker-related content I might be able to monetize, so I’m trying to put that together. And I realized, even though I keep getting thwarted on the big dream to win a big one, I can get by just fine on unemployment if I can make like $1500 a month playing. (More would be better, of course.) So I guess I’m just trying to get my money and also not let that drown out the rest of my life– it’s tough to have so many interests; sometimes I envy people who can find fulfillment more simply. (And I’m also wondering if my wife’s new job will expand opportunities for her such that she could get a job at some fancy resort outside of the States so we can finally get the hell out of here.)
My dad is going to be okay! Long stint in rehab of course, but the doctors are talking in terms of full recovery quite quickly with his mobility and coordination, and only his outwardly expressive speech as the area that is likely to never be what it was – but of the areas it could be I’ll take that over the alternatives in a heartbeat.
Oh gosh, how scary – but what a relief that the doctors are so positive.