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I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good. I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot, wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features.
In amidst it all, there was some reading. Here are a few highlights...
- I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace after reading Ron Silliman's praise of it. And it does, indeed, provide plenty of interesting fodder for anybody interested in such things as gender and machismo. It's also pretty darn entertaining.
- Speaking of machismo, I picked up Richard Sellers's Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed from the library because it looked like a light read and I realized I knew nothing about the actual lives of the four actors it discusses. It is, indeed, a light read, but also a depressing one -- it is nothing but stories of four immensely talented people being drunk, boorish, irresponsible, and destructive. I couldn't help thinking of a much better book, Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, where the destructive effect of alcohol on the later work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway is contrasted with the blossoming of Eugene O'Neill's writing once he quit drinking. Sellers makes a point of noting that Burton, Harris, O'Toole, and Reed all said they had no regrets about the effect of alcohol on their lives, but it's obvious from the book that their lives were deeply hurt by their drinking.
- I finally got around to reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aka Not Before Sundown), which won the Tiptree Award for 2004, and which I've been meaning to read at least from the time it won the award. I should have read it then. Actually, I wish I had read it before it garnered any accolades, because I think my expectations for it pretty much ruined it for me. I expected a truly great book, and got a merely good one. And sometimes a bit less than merely good. I found the insertion of various excerpts from fictional texts tedious and obvious, the story itself at times rather silly, and the final images more goofy than affecting. I certainly would not have disliked it all as fully as I did had I come to it blind, and I expect I would have found it more surprising and more compelling if I'd had no expectations of it being of a particular quality when I began. Alas. My loss.
- James Naremo
3 Comments on Here and Back Again, last added: 4/1/2010Display Comments Add a Comment
Thanks for the link to the Rachel Wallace post - that is one of my favourite books ever, and I often recommend it to people for exactly the dialogue between feminism, machismo and the crime genre described.
Not sure if I'd agree it's the only truly excellent Spenser novels, though - I'd hold up Early Autumn as equal to it, for what it has to say about manhood and fatherhood.
I'm currently reading my way through the last few Parkers he wrote in the most recent decade, and while they are still worthy reads, I'm sad that they are just nowhere near the books he wrote in the 70's and early 80's.
Thanks so much for the bits about these books & the Rachel Wallace. I'm going to have to take a look at Truffaut at Work. I was wondering if any other books pop to mind that also devote a significant portion to an artist's craft & sources? Thanks!
I'm psyched to see how this course comes together. My suggestion would be that Tarzan needs to be in the mix, both the book and the film (which are deeply different in really significant ways). Are you aware of this essay? And Coetzee's "White Writing" has some really choice nuggets that would be useful in framing Shreiner; the difference between how the Congo gets imagined as a dark heart of darkness and how a place like South Africa gets seen -- as the object of white settler colonialism -- is really crucial, something you want to take cognizance of too with respect to the difference between a Nigerian writer like Achebe and a Kenyan like Ngugi.
Drop me a line if you want any more references; my entire dissertation is a riff on the basic theme of the course you're describing.