A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman is debuting tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival! I once helped produce a documentary about Chip Delany, but it was mainly composed of a reading performance, intercut with short interview segments. I haven’t asked Chip what he thinks of this new movie, but maybe I’ll give him a call today when the conference wraps up (it ends at 3pm for its last day).
More than 4 years ago, my second-ever post on this blog was about the pile of books that was mounting up in my old apartment, shelf space having run out. Since then, I’ve moved into my old house, but I’m still out of shelf space in the library that I tried to put together downstairs. Of course, I could put up shelves in my home office, but it’s got a pretty clean look right now with a minimum of shelves. (I’ll get a nice pic of it sometime.)
So I’ve decided to post a regular photo and list of the books on my nightstand, figuring that, if the same books are sitting there week after week, I’ll be shamed into
Either way, I win!
Now, I’d love to get you, my hyperliterate misfit readers, to e-mail me pix of the books that are piled up on your nightstands (or whatever else is piled up on your nightstands). So get crackin’!
It’s my weekly round up links I didn’t have the time or inclination to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Apr. 13, 2007”
It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.
Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was
I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.
We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.
This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.
Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.
After the jump, a bunch of links I didn’t have time to expound upon this week!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Apr. 6, 2007”
We had a happy little 65th birthday party last night for my longtime friend Chip Delany. I’ve known him for a less than a decade, now that I think about it, but I guess that’s pretty long. Anyway, we had a lovely meal at a little restaurant called Vince & Eddie’s, and bantered about all sorts of subjects, including American Idol, Ecstasy, and Equine Therapy.
I guess that’s a quintessential “you had to be there” comment, but hey. Here’s to friends.
Yeah, yeah, I know: who cares about what Montaigne has to say about Cato the Younger? Well, as usual, M. uses the occasion of a brief (3+ pages) essay on Cato to digress into the nature and impact of poetry.
The essay begins with a gorgeous little passage about M.’s unwillingness to judge other people by using himself as a baseline:
I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model.
From here, there’s a little digression about how virtue doesn’t exist in “modern times,” which unfortunately put me in mind of the great Ali G monologue about “Respek”:
Respek is important. Da sad ting is, there is so little respek left in the world that if you look up the word in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s been taken out. You should learn to Respek everyone: animals, children, bitches, mingers, spazmos, lezzies, fatty boombas, and even gaylords. So to all you lot out there, but mainly to the normal people: Respek, westside.
But that gets us off the subject, namely Montaigne’s vivid description of poetry, its audience, its critics and the chain of art:
We have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it.
The frenzy that goads the man who can penetrate it also strikes a third person on hearing him discuss it and recite it, as a magnet not only attracts a needle but infuses into it its own faculty of attracting others. And it is seen more clearly in the theater that the sacred inspiration of the muses, after first stirring the poet to anger, sorrow and hatred and transporting him out of himself wherever they will, then through the poet strikes the actor, and through the actor consecutively a whole crowd. It is the chain of our needles, hanging one form the other.
Booyakasha.
Intrepid Comics Reporter and VM pal Tom Spurgeon just posted a list of the Top 50 Comics from 2006. I’m nowhere near as devoted a comics reader as I used to be, but it’s pretty gratifying to see so many worthy projects out there.
For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia
I thought the Terry Gilliam one went off the rails a bit, pursuing a discussion of torture that probably could have been written without including Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it’s still an engaging essay. With a number of the other essays, James appears to be pursuing the question of artists’ responsibilities in the world, vis a vis the political tumult of the 20th century. (It’s not only about artists, but they seem well represented in the 110 profiles the book contains.)
Thus, the discussion of Borges has to get at his relationship with Argentina’s junta, while the take-no-prisoners profile of Sartre posted today questions the nature of JP’s resistance during the war as well as his avoidance of the truth about the Soviet Union. (It also touches on the subject of the necessity of bad writing, a favorite topic of mine.)
The excerpt that I enjoyed the most — I haven’t read them all — is the one discussing Rilke and Brecht, even though I haven’t read much of Rilke beyond his poetry and know nothing of Brecht’s work. The essay contrasts Rilke’s art-for-art’s-sake with Brecht’s art-as-politics, and finds Brecht wanting. (Okay, it finds Brecht a noxious scumbag.) But James goes on to make an interesting and subtle point about the relation between the artist — particularly the ‘word artist’ — and his beliefs, and perhaps between the artist and the audience.
Give it a read (and go check out some of the others) and let me know what you think.