I was unblocked for years, getting reviews or riffs or whathaveyous out at least once a week. For months now—more than months, really—the words don’t come out, or they come out in quips on Twitter. Or I don’t feel like they’re necessary. I guess that’s fine. I’m not sure what I’m doing with the blog at this point. So anyway, these are the signed pieces on the blog over the last three months.
I also reviewed Paul Kirchner’s The Bus 2.
I riffed on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, suggesting that “SW: TFA takes Star Wars itself (as brand-mythos) as its central subject. The film is “about” Star Wars.”
I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish novels and riffed on them.
And I wondered if anything good happened in Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight.
There were several books I wanted to write about and failed to write about in the past three months, notable The Free-Lance Pall Bearers by Ishmael Reed, Vertigo by Joanna Walsh, and Lucia Berlin’s Homesick. They were all great and good and grand.
Unrelated Studies of a Fox (1669-1671) by Pieter Boel:
Airships by Barry Hannah. 1994 trade paperback by Grove Press. Cover design by Rick Pracher. The cover painting is Chrysanthemum by Hannah’s contemporary, the photorealist painter Glennray Tutor. Hannah wrote an essay about Tutor’s work called “Deep Pop,” declaring
Once one’s amazement at the astonishing precision in the paintings of Glennray Tutor has had time to sink in, the opportunity arises to contemplate the visual eloquence in his depictions of the small artifacts of life, and how such compositions can say profound things about the nature of our existence.
I reviewed Airships on this blog some years ago.
Ray by Barry Hannah. 1994 trade paperback by Grove Press. Cover design by Rick Pracher. The cover painting is the center panel of Glennray Tutor’s triptych Whistling Moon Traveler. I reviewed Ray on this blog the same year I reviewed Airships.
Bats out of Hell by Barry Hannah. 1994 trade paperback by Grove Press. Cover design by Rick Pracher. The cover painting is the left panel of Glennray Tutor’s triptych Dragon Boat. I did not review Bats out of Hell, but some of the sketches contained therein appear in Hey Jack!, which I did review.
Jowhor Ile’s novel After Many Days is new in hardback next month from Tim Duggan Books/Penguin Random House. Their blurb:
Yann Martel’s novel The High Mountains of Portugal is new in hardback in the U.S. from Speigel & Grau.
Here’s the first two paragraphs of Urusla K. Le Guin’s review of the novel in The Guardian:
The High Mountains of Portugal, in Yann Martel’s novel of that name, turn out to be grassy uplands rather than high mountains; and the book turns out to be three stories rather than a novel. The stories, connected ingeniously, vary greatly in tone and quality. The first two display so little of the author’s narrative skill that they may offer more temptation to stop reading than to go on. Liking the last part of the book much better, I could wish that it stood alone.
In Martel’s Booker-winning Life of Pi, the author within the story tells us that he went to India with the intention of writing a novel set in Portugal. Then he met the Indian who told him the tale of Pi, and Portugal was forgotten. It’s recollected in the first part of this book in great detail: “He heads off down Rue São Miguel on to Largo São Miguel and then Rua de São João da Praça before turning on to Arco de Jesus.” This sort of street-rosary may delight Lisbon initiates but to others is made interesting only by the fact that the protagonist, Tomas, is walking backwards, and that he always does so. After some elaborate rationales for walking backwards, and a farcical encounter with a lamppost, we learn that he walks with “his back to the world, his back to God”, not because he is grieving for the sudden, recent death of his wife, his child, and his father, but because “he is objecting”.
Biblioklept 