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| 4.18
| 35,018
| 1990
| Feb 17, 1994
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it was amazing
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Wow! What a book, very likely James Ellroy’s masterpiece, a sprawling epic tome, and kind of spectacular in its subject matter and execution. I have n
Wow! What a book, very likely James Ellroy’s masterpiece, a sprawling epic tome, and kind of spectacular in its subject matter and execution. I have now read three of James Ellroy’s LA quartet, a kind of neo-noir expose of the LAPD, Hollywood, the LA mob and maybe American culture generally. Maybe his best known work (?) is Black Dahlia, which I like very much, but I think this is the best thing I have read from Ellroy yet. As I essentially said in my review of The Big Nowhere, Ellroy has a very low view of human nature and American history. He’s a kind of People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn) crime novelist, who is out to dig deep into characteristic American greed, corruption and depravity, and each of these books can also be described as thrillers, real page turners rich in actual history. And not always easy to read as it is grim in its sensational details, and violent. I also, just after I finished it, re-viewed the 1997 film based on the book, which has a phenomenal 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which I completely agree with. The book manages something like eight plot lines over the space of a decade; the film narrows it to three central plot lines, focused on fewer main characters, and of course there are alterations to the story, but take my word for it, this is one great film. Both film and book are terrific. The book is certainly richer, darker, sleazier, more disturbing. I mean, Hollywood has to sell tickets, we can’t offend too much, but over all I have no complaints. The Black Dahlia, the first book, was for him personal, connected to the death of his own mother, set in the late forties. (I'll read My Dark Places, his memoir about his mother, soon). The second book, The Big Nowhere, happens in the early fifties focused on a series of murders of gay men in L. A. and the McCarthy trials that pretty much gutted Hollywood with all the blackballing of supposed Commie filmmakers. The mobster Mickey Cohen has a continuing role in this story, too. LA Confidential focuses on the solving of the Night Owl murder case, in which six people died, and initially, for which three Black men were convicted. It features three intertwining narratives, in this case of three L.A.P.D. detectives; Bud White, a violent hothead who is particularly driven to protect women, as his mother had been beaten to death by his father; Ed Exley is the straight arrow ambitious guy, and Jack Vincennes is a glamorous detective who also is a consultant to a cop tv show. He sells tips to Hush Hush, which stands for Confidential, a kind of muckraking/gossip column that was very important in the fifties. That's where the book title comes from, of course. Ellroy kind of pays tribute to these entertainingly written public outings of crime and corruption and “filth,” a pre-cursor to social media sites today trying to get at the truth of what has actually happened. And a precurosr to his own work. One salacious tidbit that figures in this book just as one example of total depravity is Fleur de Lis--a business owned by Pierce Patchett, whose "escort service” offers high-end prostitutes altered by plastic surgery to resemble film stars. Disgusting? Fascinating? Very American? But this book is filled with stories of fifties porn, prostitution and murder. Let’s be clear: Ellroy is very angry and disgusted by the underbelly of Ameican life--corruption, sleaze, violence, hypocrisy. So it’s never that Dragnet theme, “Just the facts, ma'am,” but getting deeper beneath the shiny veneer of American exceptionalism and blind patriotism. Into the muck, the slime of American greed and sin. The style maybe owes something to “yellow” journalism with its sometimes bombastic prose, an explosion of details, then there are his clipped, incomplete sentences, punchy, like a telegram: Prosty killed on Rodeo Drive. Stop. Tommy gun emptied. Stop. He’s in the rich vein of Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but he’s closest to Hammett in Red Harvest and the Dain Curse, politically motivated thrillers. The backdrop of this LA story is the image of LA as the colorful American Dream, beaches, babes, cocktails, you can have it all, the golden promise of the twenties and thirties, depicted in all those Hollywood musicals, always already being bulldozed. I love it. Powerful book, remarkably researched and written. Here’s a trailer for the movie, in which Kim Basinger, a former Playmate of the Year turned actress, plays one of the Fleur de Lis prostitutes, and receives an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sOXr... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 2022
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Jan 14, 2022
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Jan 15, 2022
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| unknown
| 4.08
| 474
| Oct 25, 2022
| 2022
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it was amazing
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The most ambitious (and just plain largest) collection of Keillor Roberts' memoir or autobio comics, a Drawn & Quarterly production. This book collect
The most ambitious (and just plain largest) collection of Keillor Roberts' memoir or autobio comics, a Drawn & Quarterly production. This book collects from a decade of work, from five previous titles--Powdered Milk (2012), Miseryland (2015), Sunburning (2017), Chlorine Gardens (2018) and Rat Time (2019)--like a summary of her life so far. I categorize this as "disability" because Keillor has both MS and is bipolar, and these experiences have been part of earlier collections, but in this one we learn even more about the weirdness of her brain (or maybe, with the weirdness of my brain, I just forgot what I had read and all of this I had read before). Always funny, especially as we get deeper into the way her mind works. But it is not mostly about her disabilities; those are just part of her life. The main focus of the book is her family, and motherhood, as always. Her daughter Xia always figures in here as the comic (funny, I mean) hero as in all the books, that Art Linklater, Kids Say the Darndest Things (I know this ages me as it was a popular book in the sixties or seventies) angle, but in this book many more people from her family and friends seem to figure in the joking around. And dogs, always dogs. Bigger book, more family members and friends, the classes she teaches. An expanded horizon. And it is funny, for sure. The title is not so easily--or at all-explained; as I imagined, it was about that contemporary concept of "quiet quitting." And so I liked this title, hoping it would connect to that idea, or to slow growth, or just getting off the rat race maze, but here it is, Keiler more productive than ever, not really ever quitting, and I can't complain. The key to the (apparently) acquired taste of this book for some Goodreads readers is that Keillor is deadpan humor always, you have to get that. This is true for her art, too; sort of deliberately deadpan drawing, with no one smiling though jokes are being made all the time. I love all these people. I read it in a matter of hours, but I now actually own all of her books, yay. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 31, 2022
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Oct 31, 2022
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Jan 09, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0720611431
| 9780720611434
| 0720611431
| 4.13
| 6,046
| 1957
| Jun 01, 2002
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it was amazing
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The Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet ch
The Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet characters. I think it is a masterpiece, without question. It was certainly in the top four or five books I read in 2022, but it was published in Norwegian in 1957, so is not exactly flying off the shelves today (in the USA, at least; I am sure he is still very popular in Scandanavia). Mathis is known by everyone that lives nearby as Simple Simon. He’s never labeled, but then in 1957 when this book was published, no one would have used this word to describe him: Neurodivergent. I have two boys on the autistic spectrum, and I think these contemporary terms fit Mathis in many ways. He can’t quite function in society without help; he can’t really work regularly, it’s too much for him, and he can’t quite understand the patter of “clever” people. He just wants to be outside with birds and fish on the lake. He lives with his sister, Hege, who works at home and takes care of him. She sends him out to try to get some work, but this is rarely successful. “What can you do when everyone around you is strong and clever?” Mattis is intensely connected (as my sons are) with nature and animals. He has an almost psychic or spiritual connection with trees, storms, the lake, and yes, birds. When a woodcock flies over his head he takes that as a good sign for them. When a hunter kills the bird, he takes that as a bad sign for them. I thought of indigenous spiritual connections to land as inhabiting spirit. Two aspens stand nearby his house (older, with a leaky ceiling) he associates with him and his older sister, who takes care of him, knitting sweaters constantly to make enough money to feed them. When one of the aspens is hit by lightning, he takes that as a bad sign for them. Nature speaks to him, or to anyone, if we listen. Increasingly, Mattis and Hege are living a precarious existence, financially. At one point she suggests (though she mainly needs to just get him out of the house, because he is driving her crazy with his questions and his crazy ideas) he take his (also leaky) boat to ferry people across the lake. He has to bale water out of it all the time, and his head is elsewhere, so at one point he barely makes it to a far shore. Two girls help him, and so suddenly this is a good day! I thought of Steinbeck’s Lennie, also a simple, sweet guy in Of Mice and Men, who also likes girls, especially when they are nice to him, of course. Increasingly, there is an accumulation of ominous moments that seem to portend. . . something bad: The dead bird, the lightning strike, the leaky house, the leaky boat, and then the turning point, when Mattis picks up his one “ferryboat” passenger, lumberjack Jorgen, who (okay, I won’t spoil the ending, I promise, but he's part of the turn) comes to live with Mattis and Hege, and falls in love with her. What can this possibly mean for Mattis’s future? What if Hege were to leave? People in town are generally nice and respectful to him, but it is only Hege who truly takes care of him, and to some extent understands him, as lonely as she herself has been. We are sympathetic with her need for love. We can see her dilemma. Here’s a passage that can give you a little flavor of how Mattis’s mind works, and how respectfully Vesaas crafts him as a character: “This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.” Over time we begin to see the world as Mattis does, seeing the fearfulness of communication, and the signs and portents he sees. We begin to understand him, as “simple” (which is to say different) but also very complex. We worry about him in his engagements with the community. We come to see the world through his eyes, to some extent. I loved this book so much! It's one of my all time favorite books already, and in my first encounter with Vesaas’s work! I highly recommend this sweet, achingly sad, lyrical work. So much compassion here for Mattis, and Hege, too. Such lovely writing. I will read more of his work, for sure. PS And then I read another book by Vesaas I felt was just as powerful, The Ice Palace! Two of my very favorite books of the year! Both short, both intense, mysterious, lyrical, luminous. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 08, 2022
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Jan 17, 2022
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Jan 08, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1770463623
| 9781770463622
| 1770463623
| 4.52
| 13,599
| Aug 14, 2017
| Aug 27, 2019
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it was amazing
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A 2017 book that I already know will be on my list as among the best graphic novels of 2022. Absolutely devastating story of sexual slavery from WWII,
A 2017 book that I already know will be on my list as among the best graphic novels of 2022. Absolutely devastating story of sexual slavery from WWII, now documented thankfully in various non-fiction and fiction works, some of which I have read (Chang Rae Lee's A Gesture Life was my first reading about it, maybe twenty years ago, as books began to tell the secret histories of these girls and women, and it is very powerful, though it is told from the perspective of a Japanese doctor who had been assigned to care for the women during the war). The Japanese military kidnapped these young women to be available as wartime "supplies,"for their soldiers, many of whom became sick and died, most psychologically damaged for their entire lives. But this is the most powerful rendering of the situation I have yet to read, in part because it takes a telephoto view instead of a wide-angle, big-picture perspective of this ugly chapter in human history, denied by the Japanese government for several decades, and brings to life the story of one such woman. Drawn and Quarterly gets much credit for doing a beautiful job of making this book available, though some copywriter calls it "a powerful antiwar graphic novel," which misses the important point that this happened and happens to women at the hands of men. No one who is a student of war can deny that rape is a constant feature of war (historically unreported as part of war casualties for centuries), but the way the militaries of the world historically talk about young soldiers and sex--rape, prostitution--sort of a boys will be boys approach, hides the whole truth, just as the words "comfort women" sickeningly attempt to soften our perspective on the unforgivable horror. The history of sexual assault in the American military is only slowly being acknowledged, but it is still going on. And no, it is not just a military or war problem. It is far more fundamental than that, of course, about male-female relations, about what it means to be human, or rather, de-human. This important graphic biography tells the life story of a fifteen-year-old Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. The Drawn and Quarterly copy writer calls it "a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history," which is offensive given what we now know was a systematic denial of the facts. Korean cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim interviewed Lee extensively to get her whole sad life story, where she was initially given up for adoption (essentially sold) by her impoverished parents, whom she never saw again. Sound too sad to read in a time of worldwide pandemic? I get that, I read lots of escapist comics, and I am sick from reading it, but I urge you to read this or another of the books written on this topic. The artwork is dark, pen and ink, with a haunting and simple rendering of Lee's life story, of which she says she never knew happiness since coming from her mother's womb. Gendry-Kim honors Lee and her survival instincts, her ability to overcome trauma, but she allows the story to largely tell itself. Some of the pages seem smudgy, as if to reflect the poverty, and faces are sometimes obscured, as if to illustrate the near-erasure of her existence. But she lives, and lives here in this story, to shame the world. I read this largely because I read another tragic graphic story the author created, The Waiting, which is about the sad, decades-long family separations in North and South Korea, based on several interviews she conducted. This author needs to keep getting published world-wide, to inspire similar projects in a new generation of writers, artists and journalists. Thanks to D & Q for publishing it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 23, 2021
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Jan 05, 2022
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Dec 22, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1534322086
| 9781534322080
| 1534322086
| 4.26
| 1,942
| Apr 13, 2022
| Apr 19, 2022
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it was amazing
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And she don't fade The ghost in you She don't fade Inside you the time moves And she don't fade--Psychedelic Furs The Ghost in You is Reckless #4 by Ed Bru And she don't fade The ghost in you She don't fade Inside you the time moves And she don't fade--Psychedelic Furs The Ghost in You is Reckless #4 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and while it seems like a light diversion from the central Reckless direction, focusing as it does on (buddy, assistant, Dr. Watson) Anna’s taking on her own independent tec work, I still loved it. Oh, for these guys it may be a three star book, maybe, an interlude with Anna backstory to make her seem more like a full partner (up from mere sidekick) to Ethan Reckless, but it is still much better than most comics work out there. The story opens with Anna shot and passing out, last recalling a pulpy fifties movie, Naked Kiss, featuring one of the Scream Queens, which is your light-hearted key to this issue: Fun sixties and seventies suspense stories. But the story takes place in 1989, in a vintage movie theater, so there are at least two or three layers of nostalgia going on here. Always a pleasure. So Lorna Valentine, the former Evillina, walks into the El Ricardo (the B movie theater) and Ethan is away on another case we’ll learn about in volume 5, so Anna takes the case: Lorna wants to know if her new house, the Lamour Mansion, is haunted. Anna was a fan of Evillina on tv, so duh, she takes the case, also knowing the apparent curse of murders in the mansion which is in the Hollywood Hills. Just to tread lightly back on the territory of another Hollywood Brubaker-Phillips classic, The Fade-Out, but the Lamour Mansion was once owned by a movie star, whose wife was killed there, and who himself died soon after. Hey, we learn that the movie star didn’t believe in banks and may have buried some of his fortune in the walls! Let’s go there late at night and see if we can find it! Anna consults Madame Marlena, a psychic, which connects to her mother’s tarot card experiences, which leads to her seeing her mom for the first time in three years. And oh, yeah, when we figure out who is behind what is goin’ on in the house, we learn how Anna gets stabbed, and a little bit later Ethan returns to help seal the deal on the case. A pulpy noir story, a fun ride! PS: The first time we meet Anna, I thought she was kind of a bespectacled Moneypenny, or even a version of Brubaker and Phillip’s own Velvet. . . but now I think she is a bit like Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World’s (1990) Enid Coleslaw (the Ghost in You!--bingo, Brubaker!) I mean, besides the Psychedelic Furs ref, of course. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 27, 2022
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Apr 27, 2022
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Dec 09, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1999331885
| 9781999331887
| 1999331885
| 3.83
| 754
| Aug 23, 2018
| Mar 31, 2020
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it was amazing
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I went to Staten Island. To buy myself a mandolin And i saw the long white dress of love On a storefront mannequin Big boat chuggin' back with a belly ful I went to Staten Island. To buy myself a mandolin And i saw the long white dress of love On a storefront mannequin Big boat chuggin' back with a belly full of cars. . . All for something lacy Some girl's going to see that dress And crave that day like crazy--Joni Mitchell, “Song for Sharon” The White Dress appears to be the third in a triptych by Nathalie Leger, one short book each about a different woman and her impact on the world. I have read in the past two weeks two veritable gut punches of books; the first, a brutal anti-war book, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, and this book, an equally brutal book about war, though very different, with lyrical passages, about the death in 2008 of a performance artist (this can’t be a spoiler, exactly, as the events were known worldwide and are revealed on the book’s back cover clearly), Pippa Bacca, who wore a white wedding dress hitchhiking to various war-torn countries in a series of acts designed to promote peace. She performed designed activities in each town she visited, such as washing the feet of midwives in one town. She’d also conform, as performance artists do, to a series of preset rules; one of hers got her killed, that she would never refuse any ride from anyone, in an act of trust. She said, "I'm tired of the war I want the kind of work I had before With a wedding dress or something white To wear upon my swollen appetite"--Leonard Cohen, “Joan of Arc” In this book Leger writes an essay about Bacca, struggling to understand her act of sacrifice. As with The Cellist of Sarajevo, who risked his life playing in a dangerous public square in honor of people he knew who had been killed there, Bacca was seen by many as foolish, living her art far too dangerously. Many failed to understand her purpose--what’s the point of getting killed in a war to protest war!!??--and even Leger at one point calls her naive, though she is ultimately sympathetic. Leger’s ultimate goal, however, is to support artistic acts, feminist art, pacifist acts, even if they are not “successful” in stemming the tide of violent history. They’re a kind of light against the darkness, acts--like the wedding dress itself--of hope, and love. “Haters gonna hate,” as Taylor Swift sings. But you do what you have to do to take a stand against hate, nevertheless. Digressive, wandering between her research on Bacca and other women performance artists and the purpose of art, Leger writes of Bacca, but she is challenged at the same time as she writes by her mother, who suffered all of her life by being abandoned by her husband and dragged through divorce courts by her (philandering) husband as having “caused” his affair. The point for Leger is to tack back and forth between these two stories, two women who live in precarity, who live at risk of being eliminated or abused or ignored. In both cases other women sometimes do not support these women Leger finds ultimately admirable, and are even critical of them. Bacca dies at the hands of a man who picks her up on a road near Istanbul, but in her documentation Bacca makes it clear that in her hitchhiking many kind and generous and humane men had picked her up and supported her work, on her travels over months. One man was of course monstrous and seems in a way to cancel out all the rest, to make you shake your fists, to scream, to cry, to possible believe that humans are unreclaimable, irreducibly cruel, even evil. But many good people understood her work and supported it as she traveled. Bacca writes of other performance artists--a woman who pushes a block of ice across a public square, a woman who sits in a chair and recites a banal text about waiting. Svetlana Alexievich writes a book of testimonies of women, “not a history of war but of feelings. . . “ “Someone needs to write a book about war that manages to make the reader feel such deep nausea that the very idea of war becomes abhorrent.” But Leger's book is as much about men--violent, callous, arrogant men--as much as it is about war, but maybe it all comes to the same thing. Many women artists feature wedding dresses, as it turns out, so symbolic an object that it is, so fraught with complexity for Leger, as for many women. Serbian artist Marina Abramovic put on a white dress and sat for four days on a huge mound of animal bones to protest war, the stench of rotting flesh permeating the air as she washed the bones with a brush, wiping the blood off her dress. Leger’s actual description of the murder of Pippa Bacca--aspects of the events surrounding it documented by the murderer with her own video camera--is so devastating it painfully took my breath away, as have so many things, I’ll say in the past several years, but I was so caught by surprise that I was almost paralyzed, speechless. I think art may not do as much as we want it to save the world, but that doesn’t make it useless or meaningless. Leger stands for artists, for art, for women, against war, against violence, against the abuse of power, and cruelty and hate. Can I call Leger’s book or Bacca’s art useless because this man also exists? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 25, 2022
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May 31, 2022
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Nov 28, 2021
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| unknown
| 3.89
| 145
| unknown
| unknown
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it was amazing
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How To Transcend a Happy Marriage (2017) is one of Sarah Ruhl’s best plays. Ostensibly, or early on, it seems to be a light comedy about polyamory ins
How To Transcend a Happy Marriage (2017) is one of Sarah Ruhl’s best plays. Ostensibly, or early on, it seems to be a light comedy about polyamory inspired by a book, Ethical Slut, and then it transforms into a meditation on love and relationships and family--and our still narrow conceptions of these things. I see the book is blurbed by someone who is a polyamory writer, but I don’t think it is an endorsement of polyamory, exactly; it just uses that as a starting point for reflecting on love and sex and relationships. The first act is a dinner conversation between George, Paul, Jane and Michael, two couples. Jane tells them about a woman at work, a temp, Pip, who has two husbands, and they all seem curious about this and invite them to supper. One snag: Pip only eats meat that she has killed, or has been killed by people she knows. All engaging fun in the opening, hilarious, page-turning fun! In the second part of the first act things get, as they often do in Ruhl, and as we expect from the opening, strange, wild, absurd. Yeah, Pip and the boys cove over and things move from a Karaoke rendition by Pip of Coming ‘Round the Mountain: George: My God! How many times does she come??! to an orgy that one teen daughter, Jenna, walks into and then leaves, not surprisingly. The second act has George and Pip hunting for deer, and George accidentally kills a dog and they are in jail. As things wind down, all get together and reflect on love, sex, relationships. The play references, besides The Ethical Slut and Coming ‘Round the Mountain, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (Let the Wild Rumpus begin!); the passage on love by the Apostle Paul from I Corinthians; a Bach minuet adding--not just two violins, a duet, but violin after violin; some allusions to seventies sex romp comedies, such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969); a song Ruhl writes about marriage; the notion of compersion; a bird--is it Pip?--laying eggs in Jane’s palm; Pythagoras (triangles!); the ritual slaughter of animals; communion, hash brownies. It's that kind of play, yup. The play is an absurd, and yet tender comedy, about the complications of love and relationships and friendships and family. Maybe there’s a little bit of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee in here, too, where things get stripped away so people can really talk with each other. I loved it; no one writes like Sarah Ruhl. I laughed a lot, and thought a lot, and I have yet to see a production of it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 10, 2022
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Nov 11, 2022
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Oct 11, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1770464921
| 9781770464926
| 1770464921
| 4.19
| 2,179
| Aug 16, 2022
| Aug 16, 2022
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it was amazing
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**spoiler alert** "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players"--Jacque, in Shakespeare's As You Like It Of course the idea that **spoiler alert** "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players"--Jacque, in Shakespeare's As You Like It Of course the idea that we are all acting out roles is not original. The idea of performing different selves is not new. Drnaso, in his third amazing book, is at his most ambitious here in focusing on an acting class of pretty passive, working class individuals, led by a pretty charismatic leader, a guy named John Smith (I know John Smith is a common name, but his leadership here reminded me that a John Smith helped establish Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North America). In all of Drnaso's work the characters seem vapid, passive, flat, they all look pretty androgynous, and the worlds they live in seem increasingly eerie, twisted, almost surreal, reminding me of the work of David Lynch (and yeah, I just read Conor Stechschulte's Ultrasound, which I also said reminded me of Lynch, and--because it deals with memory--the film Memento--which features a guy with amnesia). (Goodreads reviewer Rebecca interviews Drnaso--a great and informative interview--who mentions The Shining as influential, and I can see it, that slow build into a sense of hyper-reality and increasing suspense. There's not much of a sense of empathy in either of Drnaso's first two works, Beverly and Sabrina, but in this work Drnaso helps us feel some kinship for these isolated people that bring them together in a community, to act out scenes, a process that bleeds more and more into reality, blurring the two. Not that we get some any real feeling of depth to these people--the very spare to sometimes absent backgrounds in the panels lend a sense of strangeness or surreality to the characters, and they all look pretty similar--but we feel a sense of concern for them as possible victims in this process, which kind of reminds me of Jim Jones, in another place called Jamestown, who led over 900 people to "drink the kool aid" of religious fanaticism and then actually drink poisoned kool-aid and commit suicide. In the terrifying end of the story the acting class--most of them; a couple leave the group, suspicious of Smith's intent--agrees to leave their lives and take a bus to some unknown destination. I think, as with Sabrina, that Drnaso is writing about the increasing anxieties of contemporary life, and in this one, the ease to which many of us succumb to the powers of a fanatic leader, cult, or something like political extremism. The fact that many of these people in the class seem to be vulnerable and/or have mental illnesses, exacerbated by the conditions of the class, adds to the chilling effect. I think it is scary and amazing, one of my favorite graphic novels of the year. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 02, 2022
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Sep 04, 2022
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Sep 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0525575472
| 9780525575474
| 0525575472
| 4.35
| 15,178
| Oct 01, 2019
| Oct 01, 2019
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it was amazing
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“Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong”--Rachel Maddow I really don’t know what else you would expect from Rachel M “Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong”--Rachel Maddow I really don’t know what else you would expect from Rachel Maddow in this book. It’s well-researched, connects the dots between seemingly disparate situations, and manages even to be, in her Rachel Maddow way, fairly upbeat and entertaining, til the end when we are reminded that this is indeed not funny, but has stakes in the survival of humans on the planet. I really didn’t want to read it as I thought I already agreed with and probably even basically knw=ew what she was going to say, and this turned out to be somewhat true, but I found it ultimately terrific; I knew that Big Oil had and would do everything it could do to as usual put profit over people. I knew Putin and even Rex Tillerson were bad actors (we know now Rex had a secret email account where he essentially had acknowledged in the sixties already that oil and gas were already killing and would kill the planet). I knew from the first that almost everything we were learning about fracking for natural gas would rival oil for destruction of the planet and not benefit the areas being fracked, over the long term.. But this book is really well-written and read by the author in her trademark style. She’s basically a bit more upbeat Fear in Loathing in Big Oil, and without the drugs. Dark satirical humor about greed, corruption, and incompetence in a largely unregulated gangster business, tacking back and forth mainly between Russia and the US. What do we learn? Exxon, the richest organization in the history of the world, has made sweetheart deals with corrupt leaders in various places, even as remote as Equatorial Guinea, where the people nearly starve as a foreign minister brokering the deal stashes away hundreds of millions of dollars for giving Exxon the rights to drill there. Maddow is at her delicious best when she connects the dots between this guy, who paid a million bucks for Michael Jackson’s white glove, and the 2014 raid of the Ukrainian palace where the Big Oil-enriched former president had a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Following the money, naming names and counting the piles of cash. Then she connects the dots to the excesses of Big Frack in Oklahoma where hired scientists denied for years that hundreds of earthquakes there had anything to do with fracking and the billions of dollars of contaminated water now under the ground. And did Oklahoma benefit from all this “energy independence”? Nope, schools tanked for lack of funding, and so on. Until the people pushed back! Maddow makes it clear that there are almost no countries, no states, no people, that have truly benefited in any way from the greatest welfare recipients in history, the oil and gas industry. And then, you know, climate change, denied most consistently in the largest and most destructive countries. Weakened democracies, enriched political hacks and greedy liars. The central focus of the book is to show how oil and gas is irresponsible to issues of the environment and corruption and greed, as chaos increase in the world at large. The sites for focus are Russia, where Putin is all in on gas and oli, in league with Tillerson’s Exxon, and Oklahoma, one central place for natural gas. It’s all corruption, greed, incompetence. “They depend on cheating. Putin and his minions cheat at the financial markets. They cheat at the Olympics. They cheat at their own fake democracy. They cheat other people out of their democracies.” Maddow tells a persuasive story of how oil and gas have weakened Russia, Guinea and the US, just to name a few countries, not made them better, and surely not made them more democratic, healthy, safer. You think she’s “extreme”? Look at Hurricane Ian, in September 2022, in Florida and Cuba and Puerto Rico, as I write this. Just another big storm? “The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas—and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that—and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.” “Climate disaster has put a spotlight on the need for human society to evolve beyond dependence on petroleum, but our very capacity to decide on that—or anything—remains at risk as long as the industry is still ranging like a ravenous predator on the field of democracy.” “Here at the end of the world, with the climate crisis bearing down like Godzilla over downtown Tokyo, U.S. taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas drilling are now almost literally insane.” Maddow makes clear, we have to stop Big Oil now. As she writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.” If you want a little background on how oil is in part tied to the war in Ukraine, read the last part of this book where she excoriates Putin as the greedy thug he is. . . and this book came out in 2019. And she tells a brief and cogent story about 24/7 Russian trolls spreading disinformation to people like Ginny Thomas who believe in a stolen election without proof. A really really good book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 25, 2022
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Sep 30, 2022
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Nov 16, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0394585828
| 9780394585826
| 0394585828
| 4.17
| 1,755
| Mar 19, 2019
| Mar 19, 2019
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it was amazing
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“It is every person's moral imperative to read this book”--Hannah Greendale, Goodreads reviewer I agree. My academic mentor, Jay Robinson, gave me Barry “It is every person's moral imperative to read this book”--Hannah Greendale, Goodreads reviewer I agree. My academic mentor, Jay Robinson, gave me Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams in the late eighties. He knew I was interested in environmental studies, but I was a student of literacy learning, the teaching of English. What does such a book have to do with English studies? The answer is: Everything. Language, social justice, democracy, the future of the planet, linking Western "development" to ethnocentrism and colonialism. As with his Of Wolves and Men, Lopez tries to get us to do that simple indigenous injunction: Walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins. Or ignore cultural and epistemological and spiritual differences to your peril. One chapter focuses on indigenous versus "southerner" (white) maps of the region. How do locals see and value their own land? Horizon was published in 2019; I knew it to be Lopez’s magnum opus, so I set out to slow read it, even as the world burned. Lopez (RIP, 12/25/20) was both a “nature” journalist--plumbing the relationship between human culture and landscape--and a fiction writer, invited by countless scientific groups to accompany them on travels. Horizon has many facets; it is a deeply personal memoir--“We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there”--and a chronicle of his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to the ice shelves of Antarctica. “To travel, after all, is to change one’s skin”--Antoine de Saint-Exupery “I tried to get out of myself, to enter the country”--Barry Lopez “The young man [Lopez] visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.” Lopez over his life traveled to more than seventy countries, but in this book takes us to the farthest and most "desolate" reaches of the world, where few of us will ever go. And his guides along the way are explorers of the past of whom many of us know, and have been his inspiration: Darwin, Shackleton, Perry, Captain Cook, Ranald MacDonald--couriers of the marvelous, the thrilling, of understanding the world. Explorers of the past, the present, the future, most of them problematic for various reasons, too. This book is a work of archaeology and anthropology, of cultural biology, a celebration of the marvels of the natural world--”diversity is an ineluctable component of every time to establish order”--and an acknowledgement that we are also living in a time when we seem to be “killing and consuming every last living thing.” “We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.” My blood ran cold as I read in his simple introduction, depicting a time when he sits by a pool with his grandkids and ruminates: “What is going to happen to us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence? . . . I wish each stranger around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.” What. Is. Coming. This book is not an environmental alarm bell, as many climate change books are, as they should be: WAKE UP! This book is more reflective about man’s capacity to explore, to want to know, not ignoring colonialism, rapacious greed leading to endless wars. This book is a kind of elegy, as he takes for granted the environmental catastrophe we are just beginning to really experience. It’s a call--without much optimism--to create a different way, not just more recycling or even electric cars, a kind of incrementalist seventies approach, but a wholesale rethinking of the way we exist on this planet, a sustainable one: “Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.” Lopez is watching the same tragically sad climate change conferences, opportunities for photo-ops for ignorant politicians bought out by Big Oil and other businesses meeting with the leaders of increasingly desperate island nations: “The ongoing refusal of some governments and many politicians and business leaders to take global climate disruption seriously is part of a movement in some first-world countries to denounce any form of ‘politically inconvenient’ science. The ongoing resilience of this obdurate denial, of course, is an indication of the deteriorating state of public education in these countries.” “As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?” If the human race were inclined to do it, where might Lopez have us turn? To some common ground amid so many differences and friction: “. . . what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love.” He wants us to reestablish a loving, cooperative relationship with the natural world and each other, while knowing hate and violence often over natural resources has always been with us. He wants us to look back to the past--as in archaeology, to see how ancestors survived, or not, and why--the present--what we are doing right and doing wrong, today, and to think of the future, how to avoid catastrophe as so many civilizations before us succumbed to. He wants us to return to valuing wisdom: “One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.” Lopez always brings books with him when he travels, wherever he goes, as we all do, and he upholds the arts--the key to critical empathy--and the ways they help us appreciate the necessity of beauty, joy, to critique--as a key part of the foundation for survival. Stories, often at the heart of the artistic enterprise, are central for him in the hope for survival: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” Conversations across differences--a thing we are particularly bad about now--sharing our stories across differences, are crucial, too: “Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.” He is not naive; he knows we are in dire trouble: “How are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?” But of Earth, he says, and hopeful striving: “Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.” “I always sense that more room to maneuver exists. What halts us is simply a failure of imagination.” In such a big book--a reflective memoir, but also an often exciting travel book--what we are left with is a series of images, talismanic symbols--an old colonial coin, Lopez storm-watching near his home at Cape Foulweather, an old man walking on a road in Port Famine. And always, astonishing portraits of animals and birds and landscapes all across this beautiful planet. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 05, 2019
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Nov 19, 2022
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May 30, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0224097229
| 9780224097222
| 0224097229
| 3.59
| 473
| Oct 04, 2018
| Oct 04, 2018
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it was amazing
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“Look – anyone who invents something really great has a moment where they think it's going to destroy the world.” The publisher writes, “Square Eyes is “Look – anyone who invents something really great has a moment where they think it's going to destroy the world.” The publisher writes, “Square Eyes is a graphic novel about a future where the boundaries between memory, dreams and the digital world start to blur. “ Many people, as I understand it, in Silicon Valley, truly believe that technology will save the world and that with tech and science, we can live forever. But let’s be honest, the techies are not really setting forth a plan for everyone in the whole world to last forever. This is a plan for The Smartest Guys in the Room, according to Silicon Valley, which means techies, those rich people who can afford it, those who think that they can clone themselves somehow and live forever. You may recall the documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room, about Enron, and all that arrogance and testosterone? Well, obviously, there’s lots of reasons to love science and tech (i.e., vaccines) but how often have they also brought us to the Eve of Destruction? How many good ideas by well-meaning techies/scientists have been co-opted by short sighted greed to lead us ever more quickly down the path to ruin? Bombs, automation, drugs, oil-dependent cars, and so on. I think this book speaks to some of these issues, among other things. More good stuff: Let me make this very clear, this artwork is among the best in the history of graphic fiction. Think that’s too bold? If you doubt the veracity of my claim, go get it from your library--okay, I had to wait more than two years to get it here in my library--and tell me this artwork isn’t absolutely breathtaking. And then, like me, you will most likely buy it and share it with your friends. It’s unbelievable. Just viewing it, you have to rate this five stars. Why? Color, design; they allow the visuals most of the time to tell the main story. Each panel is a work of art. One of the works that show us of what comics are capable. This book represents eight years of drawing images! The story is some combination of 1984 and the Matrix, a cautionary tale. And architecture. Mills says it was in part born of “a fascination with cities, spaces and objects, and a combined anxiety and excitement about technology and the future.” She also says, “he internet has become a digital mirror of our society.” The work explores the possibility that this digital technology may supersede our experience of reality. This is a dystopian tale, not entirely original in its conception, maybe, not really a character-driven work, but it’s nevertheless engrossing on the level of ideas. One of the best graphic works ever. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 05, 2022
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Feb 13, 2022
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Dec 21, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0394758250
| 9780394758251
| 0394758250
| 4.06
| 25,986
| 1943
| Aug 12, 1988
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it was amazing
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So, I have decided to finish my reading of all of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels, and this is the fourth in the series, my first r
So, I have decided to finish my reading of all of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels, and this is the fourth in the series, my first reading of this one. It’s remarkable for me for two reasons; 1) I also began reading Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck detective novels, set in Sweden, and they couldn’t be more different in tone, so I think about that all the time as I read, and 2) Chandler is known for writing about Los Angeles, but this book takes Marlowe into rural areas of California. So that’s unusual. You get some aw-shucks back country talk. But this is regardless of location a terrific novel, characteristically Chandler with cleverly humorous dialogue. The other thing Chandler is known for is (almost?) convoluted plots. You may recall The Big Sleep--right, a work of genius, and though no one can precisely say everything that happens, no one really cares. Part of the reason for the fuzziness is that Chandler wrote many of his novels by a process he called the “cannibalizing” of his earlier short stories, previously published in pulp magazines. He’d rewrite them and mash them together to make them work as a whole, focusing mostly, it seems on Marlowe and dialogue. This novel reworks things from three different stories into one messy? (brilliantly conceived?) tale. Indulge me on the contrast between Marlowe and Beck a minute. Marlowe’s novel, published in 1943, is theatrical, noir melodrama, focused on language, very “literary” in descriptions, calling attention to the writing. Like Sam Spade in Maltese Falcon faces danger competently while wisecracking his way through the landmines; here’s some examples: “She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.” “I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn't produce for me—and I didn't think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.” “A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.” “I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.” “I don't like your manner," Kingsley said in a voice you could have crack a Brazil nut on. "That's all right," I said. "I'm not selling it.” Marlowe’s character is mainly revealed through dialogue and action. No deep reflection (of course). In the Beck novels, Martin Beck is tight-lipped, with almost no sense of humor, very little description of setting and again, no deep reflection, character revealed through action and his very serious, minimal dialogue. The Beck novels, written a quarter of a century after the Marlowe books, are like the anti-Marlowe. Both guys drink, but Beck is not happy and Marlowe always seems to be having fun, even when he gets beat up! The police procedurals in the Beck novels are clear and deliberate, with no kidding around. Almost grimly realistic--this is how cops actually work and live--while the Marlowe books are theatrically entertaining. Marlowe is hired to find a missing wife and heads into the country to find her. He finds shifting, ambiguous ground to the extent few novels can claim. SPOILER ALERT on some cool/confusing things that happen in the resolution, which I admit I had to consult sources to help me figure out: The murdered woman in the lake, assumed to be Crystal Kingsley, was actually Mildred Haviland, killed in a jealous rage by Al Degarmo, who was her former husband. Another murdered woman, supposed to be Muriel Chess, was actually Crystal Kingsley, killed by Mildred Haviland, who then assumed her identity. (!!??) If you find that kind of thing maddening, read Beck, as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would never write anything that crazy. That doesn’t happen in real life, they'd say! But it’s way fun to me. I like both Beck and Marlowe, by the way, though there is a reason Marlowe is still seen as one of the top three detective writers ever, with Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. (Or is that third guy in the detective trinity James Cain?) ...more |
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Mar 02, 2022
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Mar 06, 2022
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Jul 24, 2017
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Paperback
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| 037572737X
| 9780375727375
| 037572737X
| 4.20
| 18,928
| Feb 14, 1995
| Apr 2001
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it was amazing
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“America was never innocent.” “It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and th “America was never innocent.” “It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.” American Tabloid is one of three big books by major authors I’ve read in the last twelve months focused on what they would all agree is a key event in twentieth-century American/world politics, the killing of JFK: 11/22/63 by Stephen King; Libra by Don DeLillo, and this 1995 publishing and award-winning sensation by the author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. A combination of The People’s History of the United States and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, but far more propulsive, something like being body-punched with tough, staccato sentences, but, I don't know, admiring him for his pugilistic skills. Ellroy is maybe the most cynical writer I know this side of Celine, but he's also politically astute. Ultimately angry, not despairing. Anti-romantic, assuredly, on the issue of Making America Great Again. So American Tabloid, using an LA scandal rag, Hush Hush, as its sometime model, all alliteration and bombast, is a rapid-fire, 500-page epic, connecting the dots between the CIA, FBI, the Mob, Jimmy Hoffa, Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, Sam Giancana, Fidel Castro and a host of minor players. Three central characters--Ward Littell, Pete Bondurant and Kemper Boyd--are (I presume) fictional characters, but trust me, everyone in this book is despicably culpable in their own ways. You thought Oliver Stone’s JFK was crazy paranoid leftist conspiracy theory? Read this to see if it makes more sense, and we can get together at a JFK Conspiracy Convention next month, wearing Groucho masks. But in general I am a believer that no one is innocent, that Oswald did not act alone, as is the case with something like 80% of Americans, according to recent polls. “Jimmy Hoffa said, “I know how Jesus must have felt. The fucking pharaohs rose to power on his coattails like the fucking Kennedy brothers are rising on mine. . . Fucking Jesus turned fish into bread, and that’s about the only thing I haven’t tried. I’ve spent six hundred grand on the primaries and bought every fucking cop and alderman and councilman and mayor and fucking grand juror and senator and judge and DA and fucking prosecutorial investigator who’d let me. I’m like Jesus trying to part the Red Fucking Sea and not getting no further than some motel on the beach” (you may have heard the mob--Oak Parker mobster Sam Giancana, in cahoots with union boss Hoffa) engineered a win in Illinois for Kennedy over sweaty “red-baiting” future-deposed-King Nixon?). Anyway, the time frame of five major sections, 100 chapters in each section, some as short as one page, proceeding in chronological fashion, is from November 22, 1958, right up until the moment President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is killed on November 22, 1963. So this is all just a political and social and moral foundation for Ellroy’s case. One interesting aspect of this book, which is the first of a trilogy, is that Lee Harvey Oswald is not even mentioned once. King’s book is a time travel book, an alt-history fantasy, and a romance, but Oswald’s descent to Presidential killer is documented with some detail. Oswald acted alone, King believes. In DeLillo’s Libra the whole focus is Oswald, but it is Oswald suborned by the CIA. In American Tabloid, we just lay all the political and historical groundwork for the murder, and as Ellroy would say, no one is innocent. The groundwork includes the “mobbed up” millions of Joseph Kennedy, the Kennedy patriarch, his sex addict son Jack, (the “author” of Profiles in Courage, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize but was actually written by his speechwriter Ted Sorenson), his disastrous Bay of Pigs, his brother Bobby’s anti-mob obsession, their "liberal" views on Civil Rights. “Facts can be bent to conform to any thesis.” “I'm saying it's so big and audacious that we'll most likely never be suspected. I'm saying that even if we are, the powers that be will realize that it can never be conclusively proven. I'm saying that a consensus of denial will build off of it. I'm saying that people will want to remember the man as something he wasn't. I'm saying that we'll present them with an explanation and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better." If you read this book, you can see many people who likely wanted to kill the Kennedys, and for that matter, MLK, too. And the book is told with excerpts of wiretap transcriptions, news articles and other “document inserts.” Taped Jack Ruby stripper convos from motel room trysts with some of the principals. Sleaze and politics, traversing from Chicago to Miami to LA, mapping the country like weaving a spider web of politics/sex/drugs. Of the three books on JFK by major authors, all award-winning, I thought this was the best, but it’s not easy to read, as dark a vision of hate and corruption in American politics as one can imagine. But you, this was a time in which a popular President, his popular brother, a popular civil rights leader and plenty of other activists were shot down. Hard times. I read this after Rachel Maddow’s Blow Out, her send-up of the corrupt and world-destructive oil and gas industry, which makes it clear that this is not an isolated incident, men of power bent on world domination/destruction So! I really need to read some happy picture books again. I mean, things were bad in the underbelly of the sixties, Ellroy makes clear, when I was wearing flowers in my hair. The sixties was a time of hope and peace, man? Ellroy would laugh and say they are just one point on the map of self-destruction we are on now. His LA trilogy maps the decade before that. Maybe WWII speaks for itself. Stephen King said he and his wife were divided over whether Oswald acted alone. He sez Oswald was just a crazy solo killer. His wife sez it was a murder involving the guvamint. After reading Libra and this book, you are gonna side with the wife. ...more |
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Oct 07, 2022
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Oct 12, 2022
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Feb 05, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1559361522
| 9781559361521
| 1559361522
| 4.19
| 321
| May 01, 1998
| May 01, 1998
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it was amazing
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Collected Stories focuses on the relationship between teacher and student, particularly in the world of creative writing, where an established writer
Collected Stories focuses on the relationship between teacher and student, particularly in the world of creative writing, where an established writer mentors a developing writer, usually in a creative writing program. It raises questions about authorship, too: Someone tells you a story--Is it now your story to tell in your own way? When I was in a creative writing program I read Bonnie Friedman’s Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distractions, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. In it she poses the question of whether you can tell intimate family or friend stories you know. Should you hold back out of respect for your family or friends? Eff that, Friedman says; a writer’s allegiance is to the truth, and must tell the best story she can tell. Collected Stories is a play about Ruth Steiner, an aging, well-established and critically acclaimed upper west side Manhattan author of short stories who never wrote about her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, and Lisa Morrison, a student of Steiner's who, after publishing an also acclaimed first short-story collection under Steiner's direction, follows up with a novel that draws upon the Schwartz affair. In the play, Steiner essentially gives Morrison the advice that Friedman writes, and Morrison takes it. She doesn’t mean to hurt Steiner, she intends to honor her in the process, and she tells a good story. Gossip as literature? Maybe. But Morrison couldn’t have become the writer she was without Steiner. The affair with Schwartz becomes a topic of discussion when the two argue about the Woody Allen-Soo Yi story, and Ruth defends Allen to Lisa’s mystification; Lisa knows much about Ruth’s past and guesses the Schwartz story, and gets Ruth to tell it to her. This short affair was the most important relationship of Ruth’s life, coming at the bitter, crazy end of Schwartz’s life (also written about by Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift). Early on in her career and as a much younger woman Ruth “supports” the “great [male] artist” in his fading brilliance and his drunken insanity. Why did young women in mid-twentieth-century willingly become “muses” to addicted tortured romantic crazy male artists, from Picasso to Hemingway, Kerouac, Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, and so on? Serendipity has me reading also Manhattan writer Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: Lust Without Reason, about her own relationship with a drunken, supposedly talented writer, Jack Richardson. But she writes in general about that time for women in New York, who saw their roles as flaming the literary and artistic fires of so many men. Limited women’s roles they happily accepted for a time. Roiphe grew up to write many books herself, extricating her from her own youthful compulsion, but she doesn't apologize for her youthful self; she struggles to help us see how it all could have happened, as does Margulies, through Ruth. I also once told an intensely personal story of my life to a student who wrote a story about it, and sent it to me. I was initially hurt and told him so. I no longer feel hurt, and know it’s a good story. But initially I felt a slap. I thank my friend Kathy who acted in this play in Chicago and loved it, as a former English teacher, too, and urged me twenty years ago to read it. Thanks, Kathy. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes. I learned that the play began as a kind of meditation on the real-life conflict between poet Stephen Spender and novelist David Leavitt. I see at a glance that not everyone loves this play, but for reasons above I connected to it. And it really flows, great talk, raising so many questions. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 04, 2022
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Jun 05, 2022
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May 06, 2013
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0394757688
| 9780394757681
| 0394757688
| 4.19
| 43,553
| 1953
| Aug 12, 1988
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it was amazing
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“To say goodbye is to die a little.” While we may know The Big Sleep (1939) best of all Raymond Chandler’s works because of its film adaptation featuri “To say goodbye is to die a little.” While we may know The Big Sleep (1939) best of all Raymond Chandler’s works because of its film adaptation featuring Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, and indeed is (as a book, I mean, in addition to the film) a masterpiece, one of the best novels ever--and if you have only seen the film, you should also read it--I am here to say that The Long Goodbye (1953) is even better, that takes my “masterpiece” and raises it to eleven. Oh, you could make arguments for Farewell, My Lovely and a couple others as masterpieces, too. But I’m in good company in voting for Goodbye; Chandler himself thought it was his best book. Chandler is the great stylist of detective fiction, but sometimes he can come off as just delightfully clever (which is still a lot, really, if you like entertaining reading, of course!). But in these books he uses his style to invent Marlowe, who is a terrific character, and this character-making--in the context of his entertaining prose style--is his chief priority. Here’s Marlowe’s own quick sketch of his character: “I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.” So to be fair, saying Chandler is “just” clever means you still highlight half the sentences in each of his books. But in addition to making Marlowe, the cleverness in this book pays serious attention to something he sometimes finds less important” in other books: A well-designed plot. The Big Sleep is sometimes seen as convoluted (though I don’t care), but The Long Goodbye is a carefully complicated tale, with a lot of parallelism and (I’ll call them) doppelgangers (all the guys reflect on each other in certain ways), and there’s a couple surprises in the ending that are also very satisfying. There is serious attention in an auto fictional way to alcoholism, too, from the alcoholic Chandler, as both of the chief secondary characters Marlowe befriends, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade, are alcoholics. Marlowe (who is not, by the by, Chandler) sips his drinks, and stops drinking them when he is around these clearly needy friends, so that’s interesting. Sure, we know now alcoholism is a disease, and hard to cure, but then even more than now it was seen as an issue of personal responsibility and commitment (which it still is, I think, to some extent): “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” The first time Chandler famously told producer John Houseman that he could not complete the manuscript for The Black Dahlia unless he was drunk, to which Houseman agreed, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. But his insights about the disease run throughout: “A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.” Here Wade says, about drinking, to Marlowe: “I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation.” “Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?" "It takes about three years." "Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.” Lawrence Block, an alcoholic who wrote a detective series featuring a detective Matt Scudder, may have been in part inspired in his depiction of Scudder’s struggles with drinking by Chandler especially in this book. The book isn’t exclusively about alcoholism, though it is there on almost every page; it is as much about one of the typical base human emotions we see in noir novels (desire/jealousy), as we see there are links in this book between one central woman and the two men. There’s also the promise of a more serious relationship the promiscuous Marlowe may have with a woman, Linda Loring, though that does not come to fruition until his last, unfinished book, Poodle Springs. Another topic: Writing and writers. Wade sells out his talent to make a lot of money writing crappy books that everyone wants. There’s an innovative chapter, too,. that is comprised solely of the notes the drunk Wade wrote to himself about writing. This is in part a reflection of Chandler as writer and an insightful reflection on writing and drinking. As with most noir writers, Chandler’s target is capitalism, where the rich grind their heels into the poor, and where “crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom,” and where “Organized crime is just the dirty side of a dollar.” “There ain’t no clean way to make a million bucks.” “Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals.” “There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.” More examples of vintage Chandler-noir speak: “Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.” “There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.” “Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” *I like good cop Ohls. As Graham Greene said of Chandler, he was in comparison to Patricia Highsmith a Boy Scout of virtues, a cynical man, like Highsmith was cynical, but unlike Highsmith, Chandler also is essentially a good man, who operates according to a code of ethics, doing the right thing, advocating for the poor in a brutal capitalist society. “I hear voices crying in the night and go and see what’s the matter.” I like Chandler for that; there's a little hop in his existentialist tone. One thing that makes this a superb book, better than most of his other books, is the plot, which I can’t discuss without giving too many things away, but I love it. There is a murderer, and people die, and Marlowe figures that out. Now I gotta see the neo-noir Robert Altman adaptation featuring Elliot Gould as Marlowe. But I love this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2022
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Jun 17, 2022
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Oct 01, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0375700811
| 9780375700811
| 0375700811
| 4.05
| 22,060
| Oct 30, 1979
| Apr 28, 1998
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it was amazing
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Pulitzer-prize-winning story of a guy everyone who lived through the seventies knew about, killer Gary Gilmore. He was for months on the cover of ever
Pulitzer-prize-winning story of a guy everyone who lived through the seventies knew about, killer Gary Gilmore. He was for months on the cover of every magazine and newspaper. As with the Manson Family, or the Zodiac Killer, he was infamous in a time of the sensationalizing of serial killers. And Mailer was part of that process, as was Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood ushered in what became known as New Journalism, a factual story drawing on the resources of fiction. Both books are classics, and controversial as most true crime books for implicating their authors in the process of focusing on essentially reprehensible characters, in part humanizing them. Mailer gives us enough to castigate all the sleazy media who wanted to get a piece of the action, but finally, he was part of it, too. But I have read now quite a lot of true and noir crime stories, and in principle like them or not, this is one of the best ever. Gary Gilmore spent more than half his life in jail or prison, and was released in 1976 after serving a long sentence for armed robbery. When he got out he was released to his uncle in Utah, who helped him get a job, and after that met a young woman, Nicole Baker. In less than nine months, after Nicole had left him, he--this is Uncle Vern's view--was frustrated and upset, and he went out and robbed and unnecessarily killed two men. And after becoming a media sensation, with lots of Stays of Execution and the like, even moves involving the US Supreme Court, he was executed by his chosen means, a firing squad. Sound fascinating? Or boring, as it is 1,100 pages (!!). Well, in many ways it is not a remarkable story, though it builds on what Mailer claims are more than 15,000 pages of interview transcripts, and he also borrows from various sources who also did interviews with Gilmore, Nicole, and other family members. Few of the characters you meet in this western, working class narrative are admirable in any way, though many of them are fascinating, and Mailer does his level best to tell just the facts about Gilmore and those surrounding him. They are very real, three-dimensional human beings, for all their flaws. The two murdered men come to life here, too, though clearly more briefly, as the focus of the story is on Gary Gilmore, of course. And secondarily, no his relationship with Nicole. Then the trial and the media circus. With zero commentary, like nothing Mailer ever wrote, in the flattest western working class prose. He doesn't judge any of these people, really, he just depicts them and allows you to make your own judgments about them. He doesn't even make a judgment about capital punishment, though there is plenty here to speak to both sides of that argument. Feels almost like straight ethnography of the language and culture of a particular time and place. Not sensationalized. I was going to say highlights, but instead I'll say key features of the book are letters sent between Gary and Nicole while he was in jail. Everyone thinks that Gilmore is bright, funny, sometimes endearing, but he is also controlling (in my view) of Nicole, manipulating her to attempt suicide, as he himself did in prison. Though Mailer gives us what he knows, he lets us decide what to think about his behavior. A clear third of the book is a little more tedious, in my view, as it focuses on all the legal wrangling that I as a person read about and saw on the tv news that year, 1976, almost every day. But it's finally a kind of portrait of a criminal, and a portrait of an American obsession with criminals. Other topics include the media, he legal system, the prison system and its claims to (failures to) rehabilitate. And family. What to do about that crazy black sheep who goes clearly off the deep end? Gilmore didn't want to escape death, though; he sought it out as just for what he had done, and he insisted on it, and the system finally gave him what he wanted. Is this a great book? I can say I "liked" In Cold Blood better, because it is tighter, but I also admired in this book the way Mailer makes all the principal characters come to life. He captures the tone of their lives, their language, their complicated love of Gilmore in spite of his being a senseless killer. I guess what I admire about the book is the achievement of making this group of people come to life. He doesn't dismiss them or satirize or even condemn them, but makes them clearly complex and real and lets us decide what to make of it all. My sense is that so many people were damaged by him, but it was actually interesting to delve into his psyche, his belief in reincarnation, his intense passion for Nicole even if he was a psychopath. But finally, my quick summary of Gilmore is that his was pretty much a waste of a life in spite of what folks tried to say about him at his funeral. But the book is a pretty amazing achievement to capture all this. ...more |
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1
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Oct 29, 2021
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Jan 03, 2022
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Sep 17, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0451523482
| 9780451523488
| 0451523482
| 3.71
| 22,985
| 1939
| Sep 06, 1983
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it was amazing
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Goodreads reviewer extraordinaire Glenn Russell makes a case for The Day of the Locust and heand it make a good case. I’ve maybe read it three times n
Goodreads reviewer extraordinaire Glenn Russell makes a case for The Day of the Locust and heand it make a good case. I’ve maybe read it three times now, and I liked it better than any time previous. When I say “like,” I want to say I like it as I like William Gresham’s bleak noir Nightmare Alley, a tale of dark desperation in a circus world. Locust is Hollywoood, USA, and the way during the thirties Great Depression the glamour of the movie universe beckoned so many unfortunate souls. The Great Gold Rush of the 1890’s? Locust is The Great Platinum Blonde Rush of the Great Depression, a dream of fame and material wealth. “I’m gonna make it in the movies.” It’s Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles, a particularly American capitalist Dream turned nightmare, the tone in Locust also grim, with a touch of surreal hilarity in its desperation. I’m also reading Raymond Chandler’s send-up of that era, Little Sister, featuring Philip Marlowe. Also about women and girls flocking to Hollywood, working as waitresses and then prostitutes, who have had movie extra roles, waiting for their big breaks. Oh! And I also just completed Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck novel where girls dream of a romantic life, in the late sixties Sweden, but where The Sexual Revolution leads many of these girls to hard drugs and prostitution as they struggle to just survive. Stories of sad women, sold a cheap bill of goods about a sparkling future. Oh, there’s another book that would pair well with Locust: The Great Gatsby,, another tragic tale of the corrupting American Dream of material wealth. Sad fact: Locust author Nathaniel West (who wrote another sadly sympathetic portrait of a woman in Miss Lonelyhearts), was close friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was killed in a car crash on the way to Fitzgerald’s funeral. I know, yikes. The main characters of Locust include Yale School of Fine Arts grad and screen writer Tod Hackett, who falls (as mostly everyone does) for aspiring young actress Fay Greener, bit part actress, lucky enough to have moved up the ladder to call girl. “I'm going to be a star some day," Faye announced as though daring him to contradict her. "I'm sure you. . . " "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want." "It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel, But. . . " "If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.” And a yokel accountant from Iowa named Homer Simpson, whose name Matt Groening borrowed for his own critique of American culture, The Simpsons. Simpson, impotent and passive, came to LA for his health, doctor’s orders. Oops. Hackett is painting “The Burning of Los Angeles,” an apocalyptic vision of a hopeful America that came to sunny California and ended up in an angry movie premiere red carpet mob violence scene. Cue West Side Story’s “America.” Or “Somewhere” But Locust is more breathlessly bleak than West Side Story. “Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.” “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.” “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are, but it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.” *You like cock fights as symbols of cruelty and desperate violence? Locust has one of the “best,” which is to say most grotesque. The Great American Novel? If you want an image of tragic dreaming you have Moby Dick, you have The Great Gatsby, you have Grapes of Wrath, and you have The Day of the Locust. Locust is more fever dream or nightmare than plot, and it is born more from Goya’s Caprichos or Picasso’s Guernica than anything else. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Mar 24, 2022
not set
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Mar 28, 2022
not set
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Sep 17, 2012
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0805211063
| 9780805211061
| 0805211063
| 3.93
| 65,648
| 1926
| Dec 15, 1998
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it was amazing
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“How suicidal happiness can be!” Kafka died of TB in 1922 before he could finish The Castle, and the novel was posthumously published against his wishe “How suicidal happiness can be!” Kafka died of TB in 1922 before he could finish The Castle, and the novel was posthumously published against his wishes. He famously wrote to his literary executor Max Brod that all of his work should be burned, though Brod never promised Kafka he would do anything of the sort and Brod knew Kafka was known for saying things like this and was filled with self-doubts about his work. Dark and at times surreal, The Castle, like The Trial, is often understood to be about alienation, and the absurdity of bureaucracy, something Kafka, who worked in an office, knew a lot about. “One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” At any rate, according to these new (1998) translators, Mark Harmon and J.A. Underwood, Brod and subsequent translators had made attempts to make Kafka’s story more consistent with realistic literary fiction, attempting to “clear up” confusion in certain passages, creating transitions to make the relationships between passages clearer, and so on. The text I listened to preserves more of a sense of the absurd, the off-kilter, and fragmentation, which works better with the central themes. “If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.” I read both The Castle and Amerika in the summer of 1973, and never again til now, though I have strong memories of their strangeness, a kind of dark seductive quality. All of his works come out of certain obsessions with bureaucracy, authority, and “the societal expectation for “being productive:” “One must fight to get to the top, especially if one starts at the bottom.” Das Schloss is the original title, which could be translated as Tas Castle or Palace, but could indicate a lock. K goes to the castle to do work as a land surveyor, but it is locked and closed to K and the townspeople; neither can gain access. K is hired as a land surveyor, fired, hired as janitor, then fired, without explanation. Klamm, the castle official, is aloof and mysterious: “He speaks to Klamm, but is it Klamm? Isn’t it rather someone who merely resembles Klamm? Perhaps at the very most a secretary who is a little like Klamm and goes to great lengths to be even more like him and tries to seem important by affecting Klamm’s drowsy, dreamlike manner.” I like the absurd Catch -22 moments in the book, such as regarding the Barnabas family, who are required to first prove their own guilt before they can request a pardon from Klamm. K has a relationship throughout with a woman named Frieda, but relationships in Kafka are never easy, as was the case in Kafka’s own life, so Frieda does not equal endless joy for K: “I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” Some people think the book is about the search for salvation, and this sorta makes sense, there is evidence to support it, but I prefer to think of it as just about (most of) our helplessness in the face of Authority. Can be applied to many situations. Okay, it’s not as “fun” a book as other books about ludicrous and painful authority such as Catch 22 or Slaughterhouse Five, though there is dark humor in it. It captures an aspect of life as no other work quite does, though Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is one book in this club. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Apr 21, 2022
not set
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Apr 25, 2022
Jan 1973
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Sep 08, 2012
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140437916
| 9780140437911
| 0140437916
| 3.77
| 9,219
| 1923
| May 01, 2001
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 23, 2022
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Apr 24, 2022
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Sep 07, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0140156046
| 9780140156041
| 0140156046
| 4.03
| 18,356
| Aug 15, 1988
| May 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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Libra, by Don DeLillo (1988) is the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy , focused on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed k
Libra, by Don DeLillo (1988) is the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy , focused on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed killer. One of DeLillo’s narrators claims what many people thought and think; the killing of JFK, “broke the back of the American century.” JFK was a Gemini, but Oswald was a Libra. The astrological sign Libra is obsessed with symmetry and strives to create equilibrium in all areas of life. Plots, order. Sense-making. Possibly this might apply to many storytellers, including DeLillo. While I was never a conspiracy theorist per se, I have read a lot of books over the years about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including various theories of whodunnit and a range of cover-ups. I knew people that for years went to conferences on various conspiracy theories, and hey, this one--that Oswald did not act alone--was originally a left-wing conspiracy theory that many people--now including lots of Republicans, too--still ascribe to! “[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The [political, Marxist] books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.” Everyone in the sixties seemed devastated by the killing. My sister and I were sent home from elementary school, passing by all the teachers sobbing in the hallway, hugging each other. I was mystified, afraid. I’d been to funerals but never had seen a teacher cry. My sister and I ran home from school to find my mom watching live televised news: The shooting of one of the most beloved Presidents of all time, territory occupied by Lincoln and FDR. Would he die? He was at the hospital. Soon after,we did in fact hear he was dead. Before the release of the Warren Commission report a Gallup poll found that only 29 percent of Americans thought Oswald acted alone, while 52 percent believed in some kind of conspiracy. A few months after the release of the report, 87 percent of respondents believed ex-Marine, Russian defector Oswald--alone--shot the President. It found, too, that Oswald’s death 48 hours later at the hands of local nightclub (strip club) owner Jack Ruby was an act of spontaneous revenge, and most people at the time seemed to agree. So the Warren report was in retrospect pretty darned surprisingly persuasive in the sixties, but each year subsequent to, say, 1968-- saw an erosion of trust in government claims about the killings: Conspiracy theories proliferated and still abound. MLK was killed, Bobby Kennedy was killed. Could this sequence of events just be random? Thanks to the government response to the civil rights movement and Vietnam, government confidence in government was steadily eroding. The most popular theory was and maybe still is that the CIA, unhappy with the political direction of the country under JFK--flubbed Bay of Pigs invasion, Civil Rights “activism”--wanted him eliminated, and found a patsy, a guy that had defected to the Soviet Union, returned and might look like a Castro-leaning commie to cover the CIA’s tracks. Few ever bought that Castro was behind it, really, but everyone spun theories. “There is a world inside the world”--DeLillo. Wheels within wheels. Why did I read this now? Last year I read Stephen King’s fine alt-history, 11/23/63 (2011), and loved it, I had seen Oliver Stone’s crazy but immersive JFK (1991) more than once and found it provocative, and I had seen the Zapruder film of the murder many many times. I also saw--live, on tv--the killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby. One weekend saw the murder of a President and then, the murder of his murderer; so was it now case closed? Gerald Posner thought so, writing Case Closed (1993), one of the most influential books on the subject, essentially confirming the Warren Commission findings. And yet most Americans still did not and do not today believe we have seen all the evidence. By 1983 only 11% polled believed Oswald acted alone. What we know is that Oswald was involved, too, in an attempted assassinaton of Major General Walker, a rightwing white nationalist, John Birch Society extremist--a guy who said the three threats to the USA were cooomunism, socialism and JFK. So that seems confusing, right? “God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up”--attributed to some Texas NRA views In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors, so this fits his concerns with violence, with cultural extremism, conformity, political and bureaucratic structures. Paranoia. Plots. Secrets. DeLillo wrote, "The writer must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments. . . I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.” DeLillo’s book is a novel, asserting the influence of the CIA in the process, suggesting they used Oswald as their killer. James Ellroy said his own take on the events, American Tabloid, was inspired by Libra. Stephen King, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy, three literary heavy hitters taking on the JFK killing. Impressive fictional contributions to the conversation. I’ll read the Ellroy next year, maybe. What’s DeLillo’s big book like? Well, I’m also reading courtroom thrillers from Michael Connelly--his Lincoln Lawyer series--and it’s flatter than those books, not a thriller. It’s not lyrical or emotional, it’s like a literary biography, serious historical fiction, well-researched, highly readable. Thirty years ago I had read several of his books--Mao II, Underworld, White Noise, others.These books now remind me a bit of the comics of Nick Drnaso--Sabrina, Beverly--cool social and cultural critiques. Almost abstract philosophical reflections on American culture. *Coincidences or synchronicity? JFK and LHO had brothers named Robert. They were both vets. They struggled with spelling. What do all these things add up to, if anything? * DeLillo does not romanticize the womanizer JFK. He is seen as fallible on Vietnam, Communism, many things that especially angered the political right. Dallas newspapers posted ominous ads “welcoming” JFK to Dallas. * Oswald beat his wife, Marina, was photographed by her dressed in black, holding guns. He dropped out of school to join the Marines. He read Marxist theory. How does it all add up? I was fully engaged with what is for me now a familiar story, yet another theory that encompasses the zeitgeist of the time--the struggle with the Domino-anti-commie theory that was also the basis of the lies leading to the tragedy of Vietnam; the struggles of a racist early sixties America, punishing the lefties. I think this 1988 book is relevant for all the terrorist killings both in the USA and over the world, then and now: “Think of two parallel lines. [. . .] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny”--CIA operative trying to talk Lee into doing the murder “All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.” “Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not being able to record it properly.” “After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.” “The falling away of things we carry around with us, twilight and chimney smoke.” A great book in many ways, narrated with a kind of steady, cool reserve, thought-provoking. ...more |
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2
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Sep 14, 2022
not set
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Sep 19, 2022
not set
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Aug 29, 2012
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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Jan 14, 2022
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Jan 15, 2022
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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Oct 31, 2022
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Jan 09, 2022
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Jan 17, 2022
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Jan 08, 2022
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| 4.52
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it was amazing
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Jan 05, 2022
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Dec 22, 2021
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| 4.26
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it was amazing
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Apr 27, 2022
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Dec 09, 2021
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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May 31, 2022
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Nov 28, 2021
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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Nov 11, 2022
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Oct 11, 2021
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| 4.19
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it was amazing
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Sep 04, 2022
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Sep 26, 2021
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| 4.35
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it was amazing
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Sep 30, 2022
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Nov 16, 2019
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 19, 2022
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May 30, 2019
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| 3.59
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2022
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Dec 21, 2018
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|||||
|
| 4.06
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 06, 2022
|
Jul 24, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 4.20
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 12, 2022
|
Feb 05, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.19
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 05, 2022
|
May 06, 2013
|
|||||
|
| 4.19
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 17, 2022
|
Oct 01, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 4.05
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 03, 2022
|
Sep 17, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.71
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 28, 2022
not set
|
Sep 17, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 25, 2022
Jan 1973
|
Sep 08, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
really liked it
|
Apr 24, 2022
|
Sep 07, 2012
|
|||||
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 19, 2022
not set
|
Aug 29, 2012
|
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