Bibliokitchen: Mulatto Rice

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At the beginning of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie returns from the Everglades to Eatonville in ragged overalls to a gossipy and unwelcoming town. The one exception is her best friend Phoeby, who brings Janie a “heaping plate of mulatto rice.” Janie gobbles up the simple, delicious meal, even as Phoeby notes that it “ain’t so good dis time. Not enough bacon grease.” She does however concede that “it’ll kill hongry.” No doubt.

We’ve always been intrigued by mulatto rice. What could it be? Is the dish still around today, but under a new name? Although the term “mulatto” has fallen into disuse, and perhaps distaste (just ask Larry David if you don’t believe us), organizations like mulatto.org have also taken a certain ownership of it. For Hurston, mulatto rice is a positive thing. Hurston could have had Phoeby bring any number of dishes to her friend Janie, so it’s telling that she chooses “mulatto rice” as a homecoming meal. The dish represents a communion, an admixture that reflects Janie’s multiracial identity as well as her resistance to gender-typing. “Mulatto” is also probably etymologically akin to the word “mule,” and if you’ve read Eyes, you know that mules are a major motif in the story. But enough literazin’.

Down to the nitty-gritty–we made up a mess of mulatto rice tonight thanks to a recipe from The Savannah Cook Book by Harriet Ross Colquitt. Not that we found this 1933 cookbook ourselves. No, the real merit here goes to the very cool website Take One Cookbook, which explores the history and culture and sociology behind old, weird cookbooks–all while making the recipes. Colquitt’s recipe, via Wendy at Take One Cookbook (see Wendy’s version here):

Mulatto Rice

This is the very chic name given to rice with a touch of the tarbrush.

Fry squares of breakfast bacon and remove from the pan. Then brown some minced onion (one small one) in this grease, and add one pint can of tomatoes. When thoroughly hot, add a pint of rice to this mixture, and cook very slowly until the rice is done. Or, if you are in a hurry, cold rice may be substituted, and all warmed thoroughly together.

The rice is very easy to make and very, very tasty. We substituted green onions for a small onion, and used a hickory-smoked bacon that infused the rice with a lovely sweetness (we also included a tablespoon of brown sugar right after the tomatoes). We served the dish, pictured above, with ham steaks and fried green tomatoes with a spicy yogurt sauce. Hearty and rich and satisfying–just the sort of thing one wants to eat after a soul-searching quest (or maybe just a long day). Recommended.

Plazoleta Julio Cortázar

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Big thanks go out to Biblioklept correspondent Nicky Longlunch for this inspiring photo of Plazoleta Julio Cortázar. On special assignment in Buenos Aires, Longlunch visited the plaza, supposedly the bohemian heart of a hip neighborhood. Will Longlunch manage to photograph the school and library that also bear the name of this famous Argentine writer? We wait to see. This also reminds us that we should give Hopscotch another tangle.

Best of the Aughties

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So, this is Biblioklept’s 500th post [pauses for applause].

Thank you, thank you. To mark the special occasion, we’ve artfully and scientifically compiled a list of the best stuff of the aughties (or 2000s, or whatever you want to call this decade that’s ending so soon). We know the year’s not over yet, and we readily admit that our list is incomplete: we didn’t read every book published in the decade, listen to every record, watch every film, etc. So, feel free to drop a line and let us know who we forgot (or, perhaps, snubbed).

Here, in no particular order, is the best of the past decade:

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Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Children of Men, The Fiery Furnaces, The Wire, Kill Bill, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikushi (Spirited Away), The Believer, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” (and its marvelous video), David Foster Wallaces’s essays in Consider the Lobster, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Animal Collective, Barack Obama, Terrence Malick’s The New World, Mad Men, Deadwood, Dave Chappelle, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mitch Hedberg, R. Kelly, YouTube, Drag City Records, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops,”

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Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital, Extras, Harry Potter on Extras, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Pixar movies–especially the latest three: WALL-E, Up, and Ratatouille, McSweeney’s #13 (the Chris Ware Issue), Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, that time the Shins were on Gilmore Girls, the first six episodes of The OC, Arrested Development, Nintendo Wii, Andre 3000’s “Hey Ya!,” The Office, Will Ferrell, Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, Picador Books, Donnie Darko,

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Veronica Mars, The Venture Brothers, Home Movies, the third Harry Potter movie, Wikipedia, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, DFW’s Oblivion, especially “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon commencement address, Wonder Showzen, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, the totally goofy but totally fun troubadour sequence from Gilmore Girls with Yo La Tengo, Thurston, Kim, and daughter Coco Haley, and Sparks jamming, OutKast’s Stankonia, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, Cat Power’s “Willie Deadwilder,”Flight of the Conchords, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper, The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report,

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Andy Samberg’s Digital Shorts, Autotune the News, Tim Tebow, Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, Nels Cline’s guitar solo in “Impossible Germany,” Judd Apatow, Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Thrill Jockey Records, I Heart Huckabees, Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!, David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, Fennesz’s Endless Summer, Gmail, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, MF Doom (all iterations), Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, Satrapi’s Persepolis, UGK’s “International Player’s Anthem,” Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed,” Bonnie “Prince” Billy,

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The Silver Jews’ Tanglewood Numbers, lolcatz, Once, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, web two point oh, 30 Rock, Belle & Sebastian’s “Stay Loose,” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, WordPress, Jim O’Rourke’s Insignificance, the first season of Battlestar Galactica, Superbad, half a dozen or so short stories by Wells Tower, David Cross’s Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, Drunk History, the action sequence at the end of Tarantino’s Death Proof (and especially the joyous, headcrushing final shot), Slavoj Žižek’s Violence, The Royal Tennenbaums, the first 20 minutes of Gangs of New York,

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Firefox, the increasing and continuing availability of English translations of authors like Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald, Bill Murray, Margot at the Wedding, Rachel Getting Married, Top Chef, The Dirty Projector’s Bitte Orca, Battles’ “Atlas,” Revenge of the Sith, Sarah Vowell, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Christoph Waltz’s bravura performance in Inglourious Basterds, the surreal animations of Carson Mell, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin, David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, Neko Case’s “Star Witness,” Jason Statham, The Pirate Bay,  HDTV, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, &c . . .

New Cormac McCarthy Interview

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There’s a very cool new interview with Cormac McCarthy, published yesterday at The Wall Street Journal, of all places. McCarthy speaks frankly about the movie adaptations of his work, including John Hillcoat’s upcoming (and long-delayed) adaptation of The Road. He also proffers this nugget, explaining why he prefers novels to short fiction: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” Sure. McCarthy also talks about the book he’s writing now: “It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl.” But why are you still here? Go read the interview.

Lucinella — Lore Segal

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Lucinella_LoreSegal

The story of a group of poets and critics in the late 60s/early 70s NYC should not be so fun or rewarding. From its first page, Lore Segal’s novella Lucinella invents itself as a scathing satire of writers and would-be writers. Segal’s book paradoxically reveres its subject matter, a back-biting and insular literati; and yet at the same time it exposes their solipsistic, narcissistic, cannibalistic shortcomings. These are not particularly generous people, but they are somehow endearing.

Lucinella takes first-person authority to tell the story–and boy does she take authority, bending reality, reason, and narrative cohesion to fit her whim. Lucinella is a poet (a minor poet, perhaps), and Lucinella is very much a poetic action, an act of creation in thirteen parts. The story begins with our (utra-)self-conscious heroine at the idyllic artists’ retreat Yaddo, where she’s ostensibly trying to compose a poem about a root cellar but really just having a grand ole time with a host of notable intellectuals, the poets and critics who will populate the book. “I will make up an eye here, borrow a nose or two there, and a mustache and something funny someone said and a pea-green sweater, so it’s no use your fitting you keys into my keyholes, to try and figure out who’s who,” Lucinella tells us. No worries, Lucinella, we had no idea who, if anyone, your Betterwheatling and Winterneet and Meyers were based on–heck, it took us a few pages to figure out that your Zeus was, um, y’know, that Zeus.

Segal’s (or Lucinella’s) inventions work within a hyperbolic schema set to slow burn. Describing a fellow poet of greater renown:

This Winterneet walking beside me has walked beside Roethke, breakfasted with Snodgrass and Jarrell–with Auden! Frost is his second cousin; he went to school with Pound, traveled all the way to Ireland once, to have tea with Yeats, and spent the weekend with the Matthew Arnolds. He remembers Keats threw up on his way from anatomy; Winterneet says he admires Wordsworth’s poetry, but couldn’t stand the man.

This is pretty much Lucinella‘s program: plausibly esoteric literary references running amok into sublimely surrealistic sketches. If you don’t like that, take your sense of humor to its doctor. Lucinella’s time at the haven of Yaddo is soon up, and she must return to the monster of Manhattan, where young poet William (despite his too-thin neck) shows up at her doorstep to fall in love and eventually marry her. The two attend every literary party, where they feel alternately bedazzled, thrilled, or–mostly–slighted. William, composer of a never-quite-finished epic about Margery Kempe, takes his snubs especially hard, even when he’s being celebrated (and published). We weren’t there, but it seems that Segal evokes her Manhattanite milieu with painterly (or perhaps cartoonly) accuracy. Really, the infighting intellectuals are reminiscent of poseurs and scenesters of any time and place. Lucinella and William go to parties, throw parties, complain about parties, and throw fits like children when they don’t get invited to parties. It’s all very real and very silly and very funny. In one (literally) fantastic set-piece (okay, the whole book might be a fantasy set-piece), Lucinella meets Old Lucinella and Young Lucinella at a party, giving her an(other) opportunity to critique herself. “There’s old Lucinella, the poet,” says one character. “She hasn’t written much in these last years. Used to be good in a minor way” comes the nonchalant reply. Young Lucinella fares no better, although she does manage an affair with William (don’t worry, Lucinella proper hooks up with Zeus in one of the book’s strangest flights of fancy).

The real seduction, as Lucinella points out at a party (of course), is her attempt to seduce her reader into a trenchant unreality that the poets and critics pretend is reality even as they bemoan the reality that their addiction to unreality is their main reality. Yeah. It’s all a bit surreal, and it all comes to a head quite pointedly twice in the novel. The first unmasking occurs at a symposium where the group holds forth on weighty matters – “Why Read?” – “Why Write?” – “Why Publish?” The house lights come up to reveal our fretting poets addressing an empty hall. Even in 1970, no one cares about reading and writing and publishing. And it’s not just the symposium–when Lucinella hosts a party for her pal Betterwheatling, who’s just published a collection of a criticism, she’s shocked to realize as the party dwindles that, not only has she not read his new book, she’s never read anything he’s written. But that’s not all: “I can tell, with the shock of a certitude, by the set of the line of Betterwheatling’s jaw, by the way his hair falls into his forehead, that Betterwheatling has never read a line I have written either and I flush with pain.” Betterwheatling’s punishment: “I’ll never invite him to another party!” Ahhh . . . the petulance. Oh, all the backstabbing and perceived slighting and posing and posturing leads up to an apocalyptic climax, complete with a proper de-invention of Lucinella. It’s all really great.

If Lucinella is light on plot–which we don’t really think it is, despite its slim build, light weight, and 150 or so pages–it’s big on ideas and even bigger on voice. Lucinella is kinda like that crazy art chick you knew in college who was always working on some project that never quite came to fruition, and her cohorts are just the sort of mad loonies you spend time alternately ducking calls from or hoping to run into at a party (depending on your mood). Her evocation of the youthful excitement and nascent romance of poetry reminds us of some of Roberto Bolaño‘s work, particularly the joyful jocularity of Garcia Madero’s section of The Savage Detectives (Segal’s volume is in no short supply of exclamations points). The book builds to a massive millennial climax, a hodgepodge of social consciousness movements and poetry and block party–a moveable feast of paranoia and art and possibility and good clean fun, and, more than anything else, the death-sentences we impose upon ourselves. But we’re overextending our review. Let’s just say that the book is great, and if you love books that both simultaneously mock and valorize the creative process, you’ll probably dig Lucinella’s metafictional tropes. Highly recommended.

Lucinella is in print again for the first time since the 1970s thanks to indie stronghold Melville House Publishing.

Comic Book Artists and Criminals

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The Beilever’s 2009 Art Issue came in the mail today. It’s got cool interview between Chris Ware and Jerry Moriarty. A large poster of one of Moriarty’s painting comes with issue, which also prints several of the “paintoonist’s” works. But not this one:

Jerry Moriarty
Jerry Moriarty

Image via Molossus, where you can read an insightful review of Moriarty’s collection, The Complete Jack Survives.

The new Believer also features an interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, as well as some of her images. But not this one:

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Aline Kominsky-Crumb

There’s also a pretty cool rogue’s gallery of of famous literary criminals. Forensic artist (y’know, a police sketch-artist) Barbara Anderson recreates eight criminals based solely on literary description. The list includes Oliver Twist’s Fagin, who looks like some dark-elf pedophile, Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, that irascible pedophile Humbert Humbert, and, surprisingly, master forger Wyatt Gwyon, erstwhile hero of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. One of our all-time favorite baddies is also there, although we really didn’t imagine Blood Meridian‘s Judge Holden would look look like Steve from The Jerry Springer Show:

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On Cult Books

Edwin Turner9 Comments

I finished Lore Segal’s lovely and perplexing 1976 novella Lucinella today. It’s a witty and rewarding little book that deserves its own review, of course, and I’ll post one later this week. Lucinella is new in print again for the first time in a few decades courtesy of the good folks at Melville House Publishing. The jacket and the press release Melville House sent me both trumpet the book as a “cult classic.” I’ve been reading a number of so-called “cult books” lately–William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and John Crowley’s Little, Big. But I’m not really sure what a “cult book” might be. It got me to thinking, of course, and before I went to that ersatz oracle of our time (i.e., a Google search), I thought I’d try to define “cult book” in my own terms:

First, to be clear, a cult book is not (necessarily) a book about cults. It’s a book that has a cultish following (i.e., a group of devoted (perhaps obsessive) fans who work to push the work on anyone who will listen to them).

Second, cult books tend to address or include subject matters and issues outside of mainstream tastes (whatever that means). Of course, what’s open to public discourse changes over time, so what was once a cult book, over time, can soon move into mainstream or even canonical tastes. Hence, a large number of books and authors that once might have been cult are no longer cult.

ulysses unrestored copy
First edition of Ulysses

But this doesn’t seem satisfactory: James Joyce’s Ulysses had to be initially smuggled into America; it’s now a canonical standard. William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch faced similar obscenity charges; decades later, Burroughs starred in a Nike ad. Yet, it seems that despite their eventual “mainstreaming” both books have something of a cult status–yet they don’t seem to need a cult the way that Gaddis or Lowry might. But what about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? It clearly needs a cult to push it on people in the hopes of it actually being read, despite its canonical status. Which brings us to defining point three:

Third, the cult in question can not be purely academic. Faulkner would probably be a cult author if it weren’t for English professors and teachers with their syllabi and whatnot.

So, what is a cult novel? I have to think that, based on my definitions, cult status is always malleable. Thanks to the internet, readers have greater access to other readers, not to mention an exponentially expanded market of books to access. So I have to think back to high school and college, to those books that friends thrust on me, saying simply, “Read this, you have to,” books that I thrust on others, books that were secreted from hand to hand, clandestinely, until their covers had to be fixed with Duck tape. I think about Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; anything by Kurt Vonnegut; Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; anything by Charles Bukowski; Tropic of Cancer (or was it Tropic of Capricorn?). Antony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan biography made the rounds in my circle of friends, as did the Led Zep bio, Hammer of the Gods.

tropic-of-cancer
Note the warning that the book is verboten in the US and UK

There was also a pirate copy of The Anarchist Cookbook that someone had downloaded off of something called the internet (this was 1994 or 1995) and printed on a dot matrix printer. William Burroughs, of course. William Gibson. Anthony Burgess. Philip K. Dick. Cerebus. Aldous Huxley (especially Ape and Essence). Lolita. On the Road. Camus. Kafka. In college: John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. J.G. Ballard. Douglas Coupland. David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair, a book literally pressed on me my freshman year by a friend who simply could not believe I had never read Wallace. To some embarrassment, I suppose, Irvine Welsh. Thomas Pynchon. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. After college, a refinement I suppose (grad school ironing out some kinks of course): Blood Meridian. W.G. Sebald. Roberto Bolaño. Jorge Luis Borges. The list goes on; I’m sure I’m forgetting hundreds. (Normally, I’d hyperlink most of these authors and books to Biblioklept posts, but there’s just too many. Interested parties, if they exist, may use the search feature).

My list is pretty expansive I suppose (and it’s truncated to be sure), and I concede that the term “expansive” seems at odds with the term “cult.” It seems that all literature that lasts must first build a cult, and I guess that’s a good thing. Anyway–I eventually did google “cult novels” and here’s a few lists. Plenty of overlap with some of the above citations, and some stuff I didn’t think of as well. Also, stuff that I think is too canonical, but, again, make up your own mind:

The Telegraph‘s 50 Best Cult Books

The Cult’s List (chuckpalahniuk.net)

We like this one from Books and Writers

And of course, we’d love to hear from you, dear reader.


Angel Time — Anne Rice

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angel_time

Anne Rice’s newest novel Angel Time continues the one-time Goth queen’s fervent return to Christianity. Angel Time is the story of Toby O’Dare, aka Lucky the Fox, a hit man with a Jesuit education, a dark past, and mad lute-playing skills. At the behest of a wise seraph named Malchiah, O’Dare travels back in time to thirteenth-century England, where, disguised as a monk, he embarks on a mission to save the Jewish population of Norwich. As you might expect with this sort of thing, our killer’s soul is also at stake–redemption, salvation, all that good stuff.

In a longish author’s note, Rice discusses some of the historical basis for her story, noting in particular the story of William of Norwich. From a purely narrative perspective, the plot seems pretty intriguing. We’re suckers for anything medieval, after all. Unfortunately, Angel Time is more Dan Brown than Umberto Eco. While there’s something to be said for the ability to write a real page-turner, Angel Time too-often falls back on leaden exposition and tired phrasing. Rice’s early Lestat novels might have been über-emo drama fests, but they were also wickedly sensual and sometimes alarming in their sexual ambiguity. And Lestat was just all kinds of fun, of course. Toby O’Dare, despite his silly name, is no fun. It’s really Rice’s utter humorlessness about her subject matter which is probably most off-putting of all. Her plot about a time-traveling hit man with an angel on his shoulder is engrossing stuff–so why does it take so long to start? We don’t get to medieval times until over half-way through the book. Perhaps because Angel Time initiates a new series Rice calls Songs of the Seraphim she feels the need to overload the front half with exposition about angels, God, the nature of Heaven, etc. Rice’s didactic tone is at times overbearing here. The metaphysical is best left at least a little mysterious. Similarly, while it’s great to know a hero’s motivations and history, Toby O’Dare’s back-story is so overdetermined as to preclude any real moral dilemma. Sure, he’s sinned, he’s worked as a contract killer–but if a seraph looks into your heart and knows you’re, like, good and stuff, is there any doubt that redemption is not forthcoming?

Perhaps Rice’s next novel in her Seraphim series will leave readers a little more room to breathe–and think. If Rice has left vampires for angels and hell for heaven, is it also necessary that she leave strangeness, wonder, and ambiguity for the stolid certainties of didactic allegory? Maybe we’re being too harsh. There’s undoubtedly an audience out there for Angel Time, and it’s probably fair to say that her work here will challenge audiences more than most books marketed to contemporary Christian audiences. But many of us prefer our literature to pose the challenging questions in ways that make us think. It spoils much of the fun to get all the answers up front.

Angel Time is now available in hardback from Knopf. You can see a trailer for the book here.

The Paris Review Interviews, IV

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The Paris Review Interviews, IV, new this week from Picador, continues a great tradition of writers discussing their motivations, inspirations, methods, and, inevitably, other writers. Volume IV collects sixteen author interviews and is perhaps a bit heavier on contemporary writers than past volumes have been, showcasing current luminaries like Haruki Murakami, Orhan Pamuk, Paul Aster, and Marilynne Robinson. Although most of the interviews take place after the 1970s (with half in the past two decades), elder statespeople like William Styron, Marianne Moore, and the venerable Ezra Pound are also present.

Pound’s interview from 1962 is paradoxically revealing in its guardedness: one senses that the aged poet is trying to edit as he speaks, to achieve some sort of perfection. It’s a bit sad too, as Pound, holed up in a sort of self-imposed exile in an Italian castle, admits, “I suffer from the cumulative isolation of not having had enough contact–fifteen years of living more with ideas than with persons.” (On a less-serious note, however, he also praises Disney’s 1957 film “Perri, that squirrel film, where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got absolute genius there.”)

As one might expect, Jack Kerouac comes off as the complete opposite, talking about his troubles with editor Malcolm Cowley, problems with poetry and prose, and Neal Cassady. There’s a free-flowing verbosity to Kerouac’s speech, but also an intimacy. It’s really quite beautiful. At one point, he gets one of the two poets interviewing him, Aram Saroyan, to repeat each line of Poem 230 from Mexico City Blues as he reads it aloud (Kerouac claims he wrote the poem “purely on morphine.”) As they recite the poem over several pages, Kerouac steps outside of it every now and then to compliment Saroyan’s reading or to critique a particular line, or simply to explain what he was trying to do with his words. We’re not huge fans of Kerouac’s writing, but after this interview, we wanted to be. (Later in the book, a surprised P.G. Wodehouse on Kerouac: “Jack Kerouac died! Did he?” Interviewer: “Yes.” Wodehouse: “Oh . . . Gosh, they do die off, don’t they?” Yes, they do).

One of the stranger interviews in the books is between James Lipton, of all people, and composer Stephen Sondheim. Although we don’t doubt the literary merit of Sondheim, the interview does seem a little out of place (although we will attest that the interview with Maya Angelou convinced us to give her a little more cred. A little). Elsewhere, E.B. White asserts that “You have to write up, not down” to children, and Haruki Murakami sheds insight into his own methods and passions (he often conceives his protagonist as a twin brother, lost at birth; his favorite director is Aki Kaurismäki; he’s thrilled to be mentioned in the liner notes of Radiohead’s Kid A). Murakami also talks about the writers he loves, admires, and feels insecure around (he’s shy to meet Toni Morrison at a special luncheon).

Of course, Murakami’s not alone–there’s plenty of writers dishing on writers here. When we reviewed Volume III of The Paris Review Interviews last year, we noted that both Evelyn Waugh and Raymond Chandler take the time to dis William Faulkner in their interviews. Volume IV kicks off with William Styron, who kinda sorta disses Faulkner as well, saying that “The Sound and the Fury . . . succeeds in spite of itself. Faulkner often simply stays too damn intense for too long a time.” Or Marianne Moore, on fellow poet Hart Crane: “Hart Crane complains of me? Well, I complain of him.” Ah, writers . . . great to know they can be as petty and self-absorbed as the rest of us. And it’s that humanity that shines through in these interviews. The series’s greatest accomplishment is its ability to reveal the frailties and insecurities of its subjects, but also their true personalities and tastes. Many writers work hard to control how they are perceived; cultivating a persona, one often aloof, academic, or roguish, is perhaps key to a successful writer’s identity. The interviews here are never fawning, nor do they aspire to sensationalism in revealing their subjects. Instead, each works as a neat, detailed, and very engrossing little portrait of a fascinating personality. Highly recommended.

Time – Eva Hoffman

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time

Eva Hoffman’s Time, the latest in Picador’s series BIG IDEAS//small books, carefully but playfully examines what time is or might be, how we might measure it, and what it means. Hoffman divides her big idea into four neat chapters, exploring time’s relationship to the human body, mind, culture, and finally, “Time in our Time.” Although the final chapter begins by asking “what kind of social or cultural time do we live in nowadays, and how does this affect the shape of our personal experience?” this question is perhaps at the core of the book, and hence central from its beginning, in Hoffman’s discussion of bodies.

Hoffman’s long essay begins appropriately with a discussion of the human as species, as animal, as a biological entity that must measure the passing of time against itself, against the passing of seasons, and the death of one’s kin. And while Hoffman draws on modern medicine and science in her discussion, citing DNA research and neuroscience, she’s just as likely to search for answers in Shakespeare or Wordsworth. So, while Hoffman brings up current leading scientific research, the heart of the book lies in her ability to temper hard science with what it might actually mean in human terms. For example, Hoffman uses poems by Emily Dickinson (twice) to illustrate the (traumatic) effects that time can toll on the psyche.

This multi-discipline approach has become the hallmark of the BIG IDEAS series, and its exactly what makes the books such a joy to read. Perhaps some might find a discussion of Alzheimer’s disease nestled against a reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to be distasteful, for many of us, the key to finding meaning in big ideas comes not just from the sciences, but also the arts. Hoffman might not have definitive answers for her big questions, but she has plenty of salient, concrete arguments, including a few we’re happy to get behind. After decrying the dissolution of the traditional Spanish siesta, Hoffman writes:

The Protestant ethos driving industrial development was grounded in the ideology of progress and a linear conception of time. It carried traces of the religious belief with which it was originally linked, and an eschatological vision of time in which earthly temporality inevitably moved towards a future where all our efforts would be judged. The work ethic at its height required great discipline of personality, and the sacrifice of presentt pleasures for future goals. It involved a systematic commitment to saving money, so that capital would accumulate, as proof of effort and virtue. The capitalist culture was a culture of the future par excellence; it encouraged its adherents to move through time with a long-term goal in their mind’s eye–or, conversely, with a sense of severe guilt and even sin if they failed to meet their objectives.

Not so in our own, thoroughly disillusioned epoch. After decades of expansion and its spoilages we no longer find ideas of human perfectibility, or even progress, sustainable. Rather, we seem to be driven by being driven. This is, no longer the work ethic but the ethos of conspicuous exertion, and under its aegis we willingly submit ourselves to temporal regimes that would have seemed rigid or even tyrannical by the standards of most other places and periods.

I’m not sure if everyone, at least here in the US, is as completely and savvily attuned to our “disillusioned epoch” as Hoffman suggests–surely many people still believe their drives result from a work ethic, rather than some ideological drive to be “driven.” Still, Hoffman’s salient observation points to the relatively recent exponential change in our relationship to time. She goes on to laundry list YouTube, BlackBerry, and other devices that abridge space and time, and therefore project the illusion of immediacy. Perhaps ironically, Hoffman’s essay contains no mention of Twitter, a program inextricably wed to the most incrementally insignificant accounting of time. While her book is brand new, undoubtedly in the time it took to produce her manuscript Twitter rose from fad to phenomenon; perhaps there just wasn’t time to discuss this new measurement of time. In any case, Time is an appropriate and welcome addition to what’s shaping up to be an enduring and noteworthy series. Recommended.

Time is available now from Picador.

Jack O’ Lanterns 2009

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Happy Halloween!

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Ghoulish Gourd Harvest
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Massacre
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Guts
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Jack O' Lanterns 2009

 

 

Destroy All Monsters

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Wonderfully weird horror movie posters via Wrong Side of the Art‘s fantastic database.

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Destroy All Monsters
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The Traveler
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Nosferatu
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Torso
Antropophagus
Anthropophagous

 

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Edwin Turner3 Comments

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We’ve always felt that Bedknobs and Broomsticks is one of Disney’s most unfairly shunned films. This 1971 psychedelic classic combines live action with animation to tell the story of three young children billeted out during the blitz bombings of London in WWII (shades of Narnia). They’re sent to stay with Miss Price (Angela Landsbury), an amateur witch who’s none-too-pleased to take them in. They discover her (very amateurish) witchery, and blackmail her into bewitching a bed into a kind of magical transport. They set off to London, where they hook up with Professor Emelius Brown (David Tomlinson), a conman running a fake-wizarding school with a stolen spell book. The fivesome take off on a magical journey to find the other half of a spell, Substitutiary Locomotion, that Miss Price needs to make inanimate objects come alive (shades of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”). Their quest takes them to a number of strange places, including a lovely under-the-sea journey:

–and a soccer match with some animals:

The whole shebang climaxes (as you would expect) with a battle against Nazis:

Fun, fun, fun. An ersatz family on a magical quest, cheap, addictive songs, trippy animation, telekinesis–what’s not to love? And who can resist the metaphorical implications of a bed as a site of magical adventure? We watched this on VHS about a million times growing up. It’s far-superior to Mary Poppins, and something of a proto-Potter take on magic (okay, maybe that’s a stretch). In any case, it’s a fun family film for Halloween, and perhaps one that too-often goes overlooked. Highly recommended.

The Secret Life of Words — Henry Hitchings

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Upfront: We like words. We think etymology is fun. We consider Bill Bryson something of a hero, and Joseph T. Shipley’s The Origins of English Words is a staple at Biblioklept World Headquarters. We can spend hours at a site like Luciferous Logolepsy, and it’s not just obscure words we love–we’re also likely to pore over nerdy linguistic battles at Word Court for far too long. Unlike most people, we think puns are a sophisticated way to crack a joke. If any of these proclivities seem to align with your own tastes, you’ll likely enjoy Henry Hitchings’s history of the English language The Secret Life of Words as much as we did.

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Hitchings organizes his book into sixteen parts, each named for a word that will inform the narrative thrust of that particular thrust. After opening, appropriately with “Ensemble” as an introductory overture, Hitchings uses “Invade” as his key term for chapter two. Throughout the book invade comes not only to signify an obvious entry point for a history of English (the Norman conquest of England in 1066), but also a general trend of just how ubiquitous (and perhaps invasive) English has become. Hitchings’s take veers toward post-colonialist theory, with a heavy dash of historical-materialist tendencies to boot. In a chapter titled “Angst,” he comments that “it is impossible not to see the long shadows cast by Marx, Freud and Einstein, the architects of socialism, psychoanalysis, and the atomic age.” Darwin and the American Transcendentalists (whom Hitchings saliently credits with greatly expanding the English language) also figure heavily in his readings. Hitchings is not all Frederic Jameson and post-colonialism, of course (not that we mind that sort of thing around these parts), but his liberal readings on contemporary linguistic issues like the place of Black Vernacular English in modern America are welcome and refreshing. Still, Hitchings’s Secret Life is a balanced affair, drawing not just on readings of master artists in the English language, like Shakespeare, Joyce, and the Romantic poets, but also on a seemingly-endless bibliography of dictionaries, almanacs, histories, and etymologies (Hitchings’s chapter notes, bibliography, and index run to nearly a 100 pages).

At the heart of it all, of course, are words. Each page brims with little etymological factoids. Hitchings clues us in to the fact that venison once simply referred to all hunted game, not just deer. He avers that “It is quite widely known that poppycock comes from the Dutch for ‘doll’s shit.'” (Is it really that widely known? We had no idea). He tells us that while molasses derives from the Portuguese word melaços, we don’t really know where we get the term rum from (some will be content to remain drinking in ignorance, of course). We had no idea that the game chess gets its name via the Persian word for king, shah. And while Hitchings lards his book with plenty of fun little details, they all serve (and serve well) his greater narrative; namely, a history of the English language. While this book isn’t for everyone, we certainly enjoyed it and have already given it a little spot on a shelf of books we return to often, books in English about English. Fun stuff.

The Secret Life of Words is now available in paperback from Picador.

Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns — Paul Green

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In the preface to his Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, Paul Green gives us the following definition:

Weird Western

A Western story incorporating horror, supernatural or fantasy elements and themes and usually including one or more of the following subjects: vampires, werewolves, mummies, man-made monsters, mythological beings, mutants, zombies, ghosts, haunted buildings, demons, witchcraft, Satanism, possession, demonic or possessed animals, mentalists, shamans, visions, restless or wandering spirits, damned souls, enchantment, shape-shifters, angels, goblins, faeries, sirens, flying horses, psychopathic killers, psychological terror, dismembered moving body parts, spirit guides, the occult, hexes and curses, rising from the dead, talking animals, superhuman abilities, and magical potions.

This fun, hyperbolic list would seem to be enough to cover all possible entries in Green’s almanac of Western weirdness, yet his preface goes on to catalog and define the Weird Menace Western genre (popular in the 1930s), Science Fiction Westerns, Space Westerns, Steampunk Westerns, and even Weird Western Romance. Over the course of about 250 pages, Green attempts to catalog 0ver a 100 years of Weird Western stories, novels, pulps, radio shows, films, TV shows, RPGs and video games. And comic books. Lots and lots of comic books.

You probably know more Weird Westerns than might immediately come to mind. Green hits on examples that have had great mainstream success like Stephen King’s Gunslinger series, the old Kung Fu TV series, and Westworld. He also extends his entries to cover the many forays TV shows and comic books take into the Western Genre, from Star Trek: The Next Generation to MacGyver. Green even contends that Star Wars is a Space Western.

There’s mention of some of our favorite Westerns, like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, as well as the salient recognition that William Burroughs is a writer of Westerns. But for every comic or film or movie or TV show we’ve heard of, like Jonah Hex or The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., there seem to be at least a dozen bizarre counterparts. How did we not know of the late-nineteenth century steampunk dime novels featuring hero Frank Reade (and either his Steam Man or Steam Horse)? Reade is such an oddity because it’s steampunk contemporaneous with its own setting–which sorta kinda makes it not steampunk but maybe kinda imaginative fiction. Or something. In any case, it’s intriguing.

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If we hadn’t read Green’s Encyclopedia, we also wouldn’t have any knowledge of Gene Autry’s 1935 space opera film serial, The Phantom Empire. The twelve-parter apparently features Autry as a singing cowboy who has to save his Radio Ranch when speculators want to buy up the supply of Muranian radium under his property. Did we forget to add that the ancient civilization of Mu lives under Radio Ranch?

We also, somehow, were previously unaware of the Djustine comics before Green sought to correct this oversight by including two whole pages of images of the buxom lass. His description: “The sexually graphic adventures of the large-breasted female gunslinger Djustine and her fight with the supernatural, including zombies, vampires, and Diabla, daughter of Satan.” You had us at sexually graphic.

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Okay, so we’re probably not going to go stock up on back issues of Djustine (it’s in Italian anyway . . . we swear we’re only interested in the tight-plotting!) . . . But most of the fun of Encyclopedia of Weird Western is simply in all the bizarre descriptions and images, of which there are plenty. I’m not an aficionado, so I can’t testify to the depth or analytic penetration of Green’s catalog, but I do know that I enjoy browsing through the book’s welcome weirdness. It’s a great entry point to any number of strange Google searches. And it’s also got me hunting for a torrent of the 1977 film, Welcome to Blood City.

You probably know by now whether or not any of this is up your alley. We’re digging it. Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns is now available from McFarland.

Doomed He Was

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Image of Poe by Edward McKnight Kauffer, via A Journey Round My Skull
Image of Poe by Edward McKnight Kauffer, via A Journey Round My Skull

So, instead of grading essays like I should’ve today, I reread D. H. Lawrence’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe, collected in the former’s incomparable Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence asserts that Poe is “absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche,” and goes on to try to prove this over a close-reading of some of Poe’s most famous tales, including “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Lawrence concludes his essay a bit melodramatically, but it seems to suit Poe’s depraved dilemmas:

But Poe knew only love, love, love, intense vibrations and heightened consciousness. Drugs, women, self destruction, but anyhow the prismatic ecstasy of heightened consciousness and sense of love, of flow. The human soul in him was beside itself. But it was not lost. He told us plainly how it was, so that we should know.

He was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and warning of his own doom.

Doomed he was. He died wanting more love, and love killed him. A ghastly disease, love. Poe telling us of his disease: trying even to make his disease fair and attractive. Even succeeding.

Actually, a University of Maryland Medical Center study finds that rabies likely caused Poe’s death, not love, as Lawrence suggests. Rabies. Not drugs or women–or love–rabies. How’s that for a “disintegration-process”?

Alexeieff’s “Usher” Aquatints, Lovecraft’s Dagonic Covers, and Henson’s Monster Maker

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Halloween fun time:

Excellent gallery of Alexander Alexeiff’s aquatint illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” via A Journey Round My Skull (what a fantastic site).

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Alexeieff’s moody tints and stark designs beautifully match Poe’s gloomy tale. (We just love the lyrical and melancholy opening paragraph–all those thudding ds, low, somber o’s, and lilting ls). His rendering of Usher’s maniac composition is particularly ethereal:

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For more Halloween fun, check out this gallery of HP Lovecraft covers via Fantasy Ink. Spooky (and, alternately goofy) designs. We like this jam:

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If you like your pictures moving and with sound yet still highly-stylized, check out Jim Henson’s “The Monster Maker,” from Henson’s short-lived but well-beloved series The Jim Henson Hour.