John & Belle Have A Blog

Sometimes a Snark is a Boojums

Ogged emails in response to last night's snark. He vouches strenuously for John McCumber's all around good character. McCumber is evidently not the slack-jawed troglodyte I made him out to be. He is erudite and sensitive and agreeable and I am willing to take Ogged's word, since I have rather a good impression of Ogged's erudite and sensitive and agreeable nature.

[UPDATE: The basis for Ogged's favorable judgement, he now emails me, is a paper and a book. Well, I'll read the paper. I'm not up for a whole book just right now. But if I can find something nice to say about the paper, I'll post yet another update later.]

Loads of Learned Lumber

The Crooked Timber folks have been getting into the swing of the whole literary criticism thing. Good. I want more lit blogging. I've decided it makes me happy.

The Palm D'Orc to Kieran Healy's Austen/Tolkien mashup. And his post on the Peck article is extremely interesting and thoughtful as well. (I don't have a subscription either. Anyone? Anyone?)

Here is a little gallery I whipped up from the files real quick in honor of Chris's post.

Maria's chick lit thoughts? Well, I just prefer books about flaying myself. I mean: I myself prefer them to be about flaying. I just find all the awkward personal situations that arise in chick lit to be too painful. And it doesn't relate to my life.

Henry's fun post: already praised it. He started the ball rolling.

And life would be fewer thrilling without dsquared's comments in my comment box.

And now a little something related to this post by Henry a month back. I actually went and read the book: Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. (Culler is a grand old man of Theory, and Lamb is a grad student, so that's why you haven't heard of him.)

Here it is. But I think the number two title when you do an Amazon search would actually suit the book better. (When I called up this page a month ago I was offered a discount bundle of the two; which was brilliant.)

Je suis presque driven mad with admiration de Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm a big Robert Louis Stevenson fan. I'm quite proud of this post on Nabokov and Stevenson and the horror that is Robert Scholes, if you missed it first time around. And just a few days ago I had cause to mention the time I bought ten remaindered copies of Treasure Island and gave them away. This wasn't just for the Peake illustrations. Treasure Island is first rate. (Settle for the Wyeth illustrations if you have to. If only all of life's little compromises were so glorious.) The book's sort of misunderstood. Swathed in a variety of unfortunate associations - from irrelevant to unsavory to merely regrettable. Did you know that Treasure Island was Disney's first full-length live action motion picture? Click on that last link and scroll down until you see the captain and the annoying kid who played Jim.

'Arrr, Jim lad, it'll be twenty five long years afore we have the craft and artistry even teh make such wonders as "Hot Lead and Cold Feet" and "The Apple Dumpling Gang". Meantimes, yer stuck with me! Arrrr!'

It's as though the souls of Disney and Stevenson have been inextricably and inadvisably bound together with hoops of celluloid. Including: if you are caught reading Treasure Island on the bus, someone's sure to think: 'The deluded fool liked "Treasure Planet" so much that when he heard there was one about an island he ran out and bought the book!' But you can, as the lady said in the non-Disney movie, secretly despise them.

Actually, I have nothing against Disney. In fact, I am not such a snob as to disdain post-"Little Mermaid" Disney animated features. I love Disney, not to put too fine a point on it. Belle, by contrast, abominates the devil and all his works for what he did to the original little mermaid story. Fair enough. All the pain that the original mermaid endured. Pins and needles to say the least. Suffering for love. (That's what I married her for, you understand.) But she is at a tactical disadvantage. She has a two-year old daughter who wanders around holding my VCD edition of "Monsters Inc.", which she is 'scawwed' to watch, but which she likes to 'read'. Which means: opening it up and looking at the pictures on the flap. Worse: Belle is a bookish brunette named 'Belle'. The number of opportunities this affords for me to burst into song? "That girl is very straaaaaaange." It's like she's Wolverine and I'm Magneto. She's way cooler and cuter, and there's nothing I can ever do about that; but my special power gives me total control of what is deep inside her - so far as Disney movies go.

But I digress.

Dissipation and Passion in Pleasure-Mad Europe

I miss wife and kid very much. And I've now declared my allegiance to the 'higher' literary virtues. And Belle won't be blogging for a while, so she shouldn't mind the crap picture of the girl. So it's time for a new look. (Hit reload if it isn't working for you.) It's interesting to see how classic novels were, um, packaged as paperbacks more than half a century ago. Click to see what I'm talking about.

Bad? Is It The New Good, Or Vice Versa? Literary Life Is Complicated

Henry Farrell has an interesting post about Stephen King's acceptance speech at the National Book Awards. He apparently urged the audience (and judges) to consider more candidates like himself in future - to consider more popular books, in effect. Shirley Hazzard (never heard of her) gave him implicit what for with her acceptance speech. Henry says he is of two minds and, since Henry and I have uncannily convergent literary tastes, one of his must be mine. So I'll sort of more defend the other.

The French Have A Word For It

Blog! From the department of inexplicable google hits. Every hit tells a story. I wonder what that story is.

Matrix Revolutions

X-Mas comes early to Singapore because the folks here don't know from Thanksgiving. So slap the tinsel up in the tropical sun after Deepavali or thereabouts. I bought my "Matrix Revolutions" ticket then wandered around shopping while anticipating my cinematic joy. Santa bought Zoë a stuffed Snufkin doll. Zoë likes Moomintroll characters already, Santa is proud to say. She can even recognize (and pronounce) fillyjonks and hattifatteners. I'm not sure when Piaget thought that would happen, but I think she's ahead of the curve.

But it seems to me the manufacturers of these toys show a dismaying narrowness of vision. (Though I must say Snufkin on a log with a pair of hattifatteners is thoughtful.) What the world needs now is a cooling Groke doll. Perhaps Belle will consent to sew one (hey, she knows how to use the sewing machine, not me): a skirted cone with two flappy hands, itty teeth, sad eyes. And a velcro-sealed opening at the back where you stuff in a big one of those sports injury cold-paks. You put your Groke at the bottom of the bed and it leaves a spot that's cold and clammy for hours. Kids love it. Good for sports injuries.

"Matrix Revolutions"? I really liked it. Really. Better than "Reloaded", which I really liked.

The Hunted

Rented and watched "The Hunted" - given the fundamental weakness of my character. Tommy "a one armed man killed your wife?" Lee Jones and Benicio "flip you for real" del Toro are, in fact, sort of fun to watch pretending to knife-fight. Guy meets guy. Guy trains guy to kill guys. Guys lose guy. Guy sends guy letters. Guy gets back at guy in a way. Guy hunts guy. Chick sort of hanging around in a helicopter. Tale as old as time.

One thing to be said. Maybe - not sure - there was a time when action movies thought morality was simple: black hat versus white hat. With only the occasionally slightly confusing idiot man-child to complicate the scenery. Now no one wants to make a movie about how guys in white hats righteously kill guys in black hats. Which is good sense; morality not being a matter of white and black hats. But there is something distinctive about watching someone try to explain - very earnestly - how things are complex, who obviously has absolutely not the least vestige of an idea why they are not, in fact, utterly simple. Cue knife-fight.

Less Thrills, the RIAA Way

Belle bought me a really great CD for my b-day. The Thrills. The album is "So Much For the City". (That's just an Amazon link. The band's website seems to be in a state of profound non-constructedness, so I won't link.)

They sound sort of like, um, Steven Malkmus of Pavement, backed by the High Llamas, very sweetly trying to sound like the Beach Boys "Pet Sounds"; with twangly, wingly Byrd's rickenbackers and banjos. Maybe a few cherub-like Burrito Brothers flapping around the studio, musing and bemusing. Touch of Teenage Fanclub, but in a good way. A couple of band members are trying hard to look like Burrito Brothers. The stitching. A couple others are pushing the dorky sweaters for hipsters envelope pretty brutally. They've all got that 'a little girl could beat me up' winsome pidgeonchestedness. They're Irish. Not like I think that means they have to wear green bowlers or look like U2 or anything. But does every song have to be about Santa Cruz, Big Sur, Hollywood, Las Vegas, Elvis, or the sun? Ah, well. We are all allowed to dream any weird thing we want. Especially when every song is a sweet pop dream, as I find is the case.

Except that I can't play every song on this CD for which my wife paid good cash dollars. I can't play track 1, "Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)" - even though it's one of the better tracks. It wouldn't input into iTunes on my iBook. I tried it in my iMac at school. Result: spinning beachball for 20 frickin minutes before I got the poor, stricken angle-poise affair to barf the offending silver disc lodged in its cybercraw. Why do I think this has something to do with this kindly announcement on the back?

NOTE: for copyright protection, this CD incorporates copy control technology. It is designed to be compatible with CD Audio players, DVD Players and PC-MS Windows 95 blahdy blahdy ....Mac OS 8.6-9, with the CarbonLib extension and Mac OS X.

Should be me, right? Oh, this next bit covers my case:

Neither the CD manufacturer nor the CD distrubotr however makes any representation or warranty with respect to the nature and compatibility of such copy control technology with any audio-visual devices or equipment and shall not be held liable for any loss or damage arising from the use thereof blahdy blahdly ...

Oh, that's all right then. They never said it would play on equipment I buy to play it. Alles in Ordnung, Herr Valenti. To be precise, I can input all the tracks but one at home, and I can play the final track at home if I actually go and get the CD out of its little slip in the large volume of CD's under the sofa. So I can play. One. Lousy. Track. (Good track, though.) I can't even get track 1 to play at work, and I have to make sure not to have repeat on, in which case I go round back where I started and it's spinning beachball fun for me! (Go get coffee while I wait for my iMac to get ready to hawk up this silver hairball.)

So: can I recommend that you buy this great album, on which every track is a winner? Frankly, I wouldn't have bought it if I knew it was going to be a jerk about it. Although I'm still glad I've got it. And maybe you are not one of the cool kids who likes to be able to use these new-fangled MP3 things to play music on a sort of 'hard disk'. But me: I'm bleeding edge cool. I play music on my computer.

I'll never buy another disc with one of these RIAA warning labels on the back. Seriously. Lots of good music I'll miss out on because I'm no longer willing to risk it.

And inside the case there's this little note they wrote me, thanking me for doing something I'll never do again if I can help it and assuring me piracy is killing music and hurting artists. Gee, with friends like these, I sure hope music and artists don't have any enemies.

I was actually roommates with Jack Valenti's daughter for a summer. She was a real nice young lady. And she moved out and left behind her White Album CD, which I still have, because I honestly don't have the slightest idea where she is.

The Issue Regarding TCS

This isn't important. About 3000 more important things happened in the world this week. But some people still seem to think that somehow the whole TCS brouhaha comes down to whether TCS publishes crap and/or tells people what to write. That is, a few lefties seem to be arguing: TCS is a sort of astroturf lobbying front -> TCS publishes crap. Most righties seem to be running this argument in reverse. Since TCS does not publish crap, i.e. it's OK or even quite good, thank you -> TCS cannot be some sort of astroturf lobbying front. It is in fact totally irrelevant whether the content is any good AND whether 99% of the contributors have been told what to say. Cease and desist thinking a determination of the quality and overall autonomy of content at TCS has anything to do with resolution of this admittedly not world-historical question of journalistic ethics.