January 2009

January 11, 2009

Just the thing

for another snowbound day.  

What these forms of pain have in common is the feeling of loss, of negation.  The pain of the soul is about something that is not present, has not existed, nor could have existed.  Just as ignorance in some cases can sharpen our judgment because we approach questions with an undistracted mind, without preconceived notions, a kind of elementary innocence can protect us from the pain of the soul.  One who has not understood life's opportunities cannot grieve upon having lost them.

In that sense, pain of the soul belongs to the enlightened.  

              Lars Gustafsson, "Time, Pain and Loss," Grey Hope. ed. Sigrid Sandström, Atopia Project #4,66.

January 11                        Black Sun

And a good essay in the same collection on Beckett and Bernhard, "those pessimists," concludes

          Is this what characterizes the literary--that language does not reconcile, but rather carries traces of darkness and pain?  That the crypt can never be cleared out through mania, but continues as a melancholic remnant--a cipher that characterizes all poetic language.

                Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson, 1992

January 12       Slumdogs and other dogs

Earlier this week I read Aravind Adiga's 2008 Man Booker Prize winning novel White Tiger.  Terrible book.  Pitched at ruling class guilt and "postcolonial anxieties."  More shallow a portrait of class, poverty and the desperation of both than a comic book would have provided.  Cold and cruel.  Funny in a silly way.  Kitsch savagery.  

Last night we saw Slumdog Millionaire and that shows all the more how cynical a calculated "prize winner" White Tiger is.  Slumdog deserves all the rave reviews it is getting.  Warm and complex.  Tells the same old fairy tale about beating the odds and getting both the money and the lady, but does so in order to take us into the human heart.  

And yet White Tiger is being promoted.  All English professors in America a few months ago got a letter from Simon & Schuster's touting the value of this novel.

"The entire freshman class of Georgetown University is reading this book next year." 

My estimation of Georgetown has just plummeted.   

January 14      Five, Seven, Nay Eleven Stars

Alexander Theroux's    Laura Warholic

Just posted this review on Amazon and Goodreads

Count me in with the five star reviewers. This is a magnificent, sweet, sad, terribly moving and incredibly satisfying book. Astonishing achievement. Never once looked at a dictionary---just let the verbal hyper-abundance wash me over into bliss. Maximalist beckettianism. Nah, that's not it. Just impossible to encapsulate and convey. A comic book blown apart into an epic pop romance meditation. Theroux ponders and pontificates and rants and satirizes and romances the reader with the most reading fun I've had in years. Nothing at all like it----which is a wonderful thing.

January 29, 2009          Updike?

WEDS 

snow day. OFF  hooray.  no Prizes class. 

I can't figure out what I have to say or feel about Updike.  Admire his productivity and general quality.  Always a bit amazed and put off by the lapidary prose style----sometimes show offey?  so often superb.   Maybe he got overshadowed by Mailer and the other new yorkers he so aspired to run with and succeeded.  I remember reading Rabbit Runs my sophomore year---and I almost knew then but not quite that I was just five or so years too young to really get what all the excitement was about.    Which maybe is how Updike always struck me----as much as I wanted to be a fan I never really got so excited by his work that it ever seemed essential---to me---to keep up with it.   Always felt like there was a coolness to it that kept me off.  And the sexuality was somehow "available" to him as a Protestant writer as it never was to "us Catholics."  And the suburban aesthetics/ethics ---westchester county? was yet another alien country to me.  

 Urbane.  The consummate newyorker writer of his generation??  The old new yorker----of William Shawn and his circle.   Not as warm as Cheever was.  Maybe better though?   In some ways.  But then again maybe not.  

---------

took the car down to the garage downtown---KTM's Kevin bought the biz from Chris Clarke.  Brian has same affect as Casey---decided it is generational----

Drove  Joe's car  this morning to see Dr Chung.  He agreed with me that the red eye thing was a little sub-cutaneous vessel rupture.  No worry, nothing to do for it.  Ben has almost all the wallpaper stripped off the hallway.  Paint it next week.  Brandeis is selling the whole Rose Museum collection.  Wow.  They must be in deep debt doo-doo.  Shame.  It is the only such collection of Good contemporary art in New England.