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March 3  2012   The Perfect Spurious/Dogma Sandwich

The Perfect Spurious Dogma Sandwich--A Modest Suggestion

Like many others, I loved Spurious and looked forward to the second book in the announced trilogy, Dogma.  In between the two I saw the two prize movies of the year and pondered how complimentary they are with one another.  Midnight in Paris celebrates America's love for Paris and the French movie The Artist celebrates the French love for Hollywood.  Together they bookend the twentieth century in iconic ways.  Both have a lightness of spirit, brilliance, wit, joy, and both give a loving send-up to the objects of their affections.

I could say they are both echoed in Lars Iyer's lovely books but that would be taking it too far.  Maybe.  What I want to get at instead is the chance complimentarity I found in the book I ended up reading while I was waiting for Dogma to come out and a copy to get into my hands.  After Spurious, what to read, what to read?  I tried this and that, including more dipping into Pessoa's Disquiet.  A good choice for a while but even that just wasn't right.  Then I nooked Nicholson Baker's recent book, The House of Holes.  And this is the suggestion I would make to all fans of Iyer.  Baker's book, especially when sandwiched with Dogma and Spurious, either in the middle of, or at either end of the threesome, make a perfect, exquisite and unique reading experience.  Perfect until Iyer's concluding tome appears and even then I bet I will continue my suggestion and make it a "found" Quartet.  Baker's book involves a number of characters, not just the two wastrels in Iyer's works, who wander a good deal in search of various pleasures.  House compliments Iyer's books by being very opposite in many ways, and yet there is a lightness of brilliance, a sense of the infinitude of inventiveness, the ongoing flirtations with the void, the twists and turns on the road to meaning and meaning after no meaning, the abandonment of paradox and the paradoxes of abandonment, and on and on.  All three books engage weighty issues, flotsam and jetsam of all sorts from the histories of philosophy and heavy thought and the ragbag of literary strategies familiar to us all in our post-colonial, post-theory, post-postness of exaltation and boredom, delay and tedium, distraction and vagueness in the face of every crisis we can imagine.  Class warfare too, for sure.  Iyer is a distant half-nephew of the famous older travel writer-philosopher, Pico Iyer (from ancient Brahmin clans all) and Baker is on record with his much earlier adulatory book on John Updike, so in these works too they both work out off stage the ways they angle for higher position with in the palaces of prizes.  But forget further argument or suggestion.   Try it yourself and see what you think.  Read House of Holes before, after, along side Spurious and Dogma and enjoy the sub-textual, secret nuances of correspondence vibrating among the unholy trinity.  See if Baker doesn't amplify Iyer and Iyer Baker in ways no one could have foreseen nor quite understand afterwards.

March 19,   Dyer's Zone

I just finished this morning reading Dyer's newest book---Zona,
all about the Stalker movie by Tarkovsky.  Which I do recall having
watched on dvd some years ago when Nicholas told me I had to
watch it.  I found it pretty baffling for sure.  One website here
says you can watch it all again in parts on youtube but I couldn't
get them to work.  Besides I really wanted to let Dyer do his book
as book without trying to re-watch the movie.

I've been a Dyer fan for years but I have to say I was under whelmed
by this Stalker book.  He clearly lets himself finally get out his
long time obsession with the film.  But the book feels too often like
watching a dog chew a bone, to use a fresh comparison.  There's more
to complain about but enough for now.  Lots of good passages too
as usual.

I may change my mind after I sleep on it a day or two.  Dyer writes so well I feel bad about not being more enthused and in a day or so I could realize that this unseasonably hot weather we're having has really addled my brain and of course this book on one movie is brilliant.  Still, it is in the category of works by Dyer that are the non-narrative books---most recently the one on photography.  That was more successful but the two are now of a piece---photos, film.  His Venice-Varanasi twined novellas, now that's where he works the magic once again.

I just found myself saying "for the next book to read I want to read a real paperback and not something on the Nook or Kindle.  Alternate media, one paper, one text."

So now I'm wondering if I'm tending to think more poorly of books I read on the new devices?  It could well be.  A lifetime psychosis, after all, that the real books, the great works of literature, are in paper form, with SPINES.  These new devices  don't really have the capabilities of great writing built into them.  Now I'll have to do some archaeology---did I finish reading The Red and the Black on Kindle?

March 20, 2012  Blog Farewell

My Stats counter says this will be the 978th Post on this blog.  The time span is 2005 to today, March 20, 2012, a little over seven years.

Wordpress says my domain name will expire April 5.  If my memory is even somewhat reliable, it seems that two years ago Wordpress wanted about $69.95 or even $89.95 to renew the blog domain name for two years.  Now they are demanding $17 and that seems entirely too much to me.  I had made a mental note last year, or the year before, to refuse to pay $89 again.  In effect, then, to shut down the blog or move it over to the duty-free Blogger site that I've had for this same length of time under the name "Chromenos."

I've used that for paintings.

The drop in domain fee says something here.  I'm hardly a web architect or information insider of any sort, but something must be happening.  The BookFace thing for sure.  It is giving Google sad news these days.  A general sense that "blogs" are "over."  Whatever they were and are now?  Tweets suffice?  Or just a personal sense with me, tied no doubt to the newbie state of being jubilated from my previous occupation and profession.  And something more.  But what?

Anyway, here goes.  This blog is on its way down and out and whatever continues on will go to   Chromenos at

http://chromenos.blogspot.com/